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Yeah, yeah, let's go. You ain't gotta ask me, we can hit the road? Got room in the back seat? Boys from the back street? Come so far? Just singing over rap beats? See you on the way up? Only looking down? Remember seeing where we came from? You ain't gotta weigh it up? Never gonna slow back down? There's no stopping now? They can't take us down? There's no reason to fight the spirit? Cause I love this life? Everything's all right? And there's no reason to stop believing? There's no reason to fight the feeling? Yeah? Love this life, yeah? Love this life, yeah? Love this life, yeah, love this life? I won't wait around for the curl. Life is not a race? It's all one big. I can see right now that the truth is go. Feels like letting go? Love this life, yeah? Feels all right? And there's no reason to stop? And the future's bright, yeah? Love is life. Yeah.

What is going on, guys? How is it going? I'm live on YouTube. I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. If you see me looking over here, I'm looking at Instagram. Waiting on Ethan, my coo. He's caught up in a meeting here, but he will be here shortly. But as we wait for him to pop in here, what kind of questions do you guys have around scaling your video business? I'll kind of go on some rants for a second and then any kind of questions you guys have, drop them down below. Let me know. Where are you guys calling in from? Let me know that as well. Be curious to see where everyone is coming in from here. See? One sec, guys. All right, cool. So where are we calling in from? What is up? BVEC visuals on Instagram. John Godwin. How's it do? How's it going? Got Debbie, the creator, over here. What is up? We got Sutton scenes. What's going on? I love these names. Guys, what kind of questions do we have around scaling our video business? Getting more clients, getting more leads, getting more retainers? What kind of questions do you have? I am happy to answer those for you. And let's see. I'm just waiting on some people to pop in here. Let's see what is going on, guys. Let's start by, like, where is everybody calling in from? Where's everybody coming in from? We got Newport Nice Sweets. We got Finished Works. Finish Works. What kind of content do you create? Let me know in the chat. And what are some of the main bottlenecks or constraints of your video business right now? I'm happy to answer that. We got Quebec, Canada, Christian Gomez. What's going on? Let's see. Nice, guys. What else? Where else are we calling in from? Let me see. Let's see. Let's see. And then with Christian and finished works, what kind of questions do you guys have? What kind of, like, things are you struggling with within the video business? What are some of the issues that you're running into? Let me know. We got Toronto, Canada. There he is. Ethan the man. What about meetings with clients? It's too busy for us over here.

Here.

One sec. Let me move this over from India. What is up. Where else, guys? Where else what? What are some of the problems that you're running into as a video business owner, as a videographer, when you're scaling your video business? So a lot of times, like, we talk to people and they're struggling with going from freelancer to video business owner and kind of making that shift between the two. But I'm curious to hear from you guys, like, what are some of the issues that you're running into? What are some of the problems that you're running into? And where are you looking to scale the business? How much money are you looking to make? Like, where do you want to be? Let's see. We don't niche down, which is a problem. We've been trying to focus on municipalities. Okay, that's interesting. Now finish works. I'm curious, why do you not niche down? Like, why. Why do you specifically not do that? And then you said, leads are my biggest issue. Got it. So I'm curious, like, why you don't niche down. I know a lot of people want to do a lot of different things and they want to have a bunch of different industries that they work with, but unfortunately, a lot of times that just bottlenecks them and keeps them from getting to, you know, higher revenue because you don't become an expert in a specific niche. Right. But I'm curious, like, what. How are you getting leads right now? And what does that look like? And then I can kind of map out more of a game plan for you as. As far as, like, how you can actually do that to get. Give you some. Some ideas? Let's see. While we're waiting for that, let's go over a couple other questions here in a sec. Let's see how to get clients as a freelance video editor for long form, long term. So when it comes to keeping clients, it just comes down to, like, actually doing a good job for them. So, like, if you're keeping Your clients happy, you'll have low churn, which means, like, they won't leave. Churn means that they churn out. So they pay you, they stay for a couple months, and then they leave. If you, like, you want to figure out what month are they leaving on, why are they leaving? And then we need to attack the bottleneck there. There's something within your service that people are not happy with, and that's why they're leaving. Right, Ethan, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, no, I think it's, you know, could be. You could be a couple things. Could be results. You know, having a retainer is a great way to keep people on for longer, too. Not just, you know, instead of just.

Like, hey, there's a project. Hey, when are you coming back? Hey, when you gonna pay me again? Right? You have an actual, like, system to that. Let's see.

And I think. And I think showing that you can solve a problem too, gives you more longevity to it. You know, just.

What kind of problems would they be solving, though?

Could be, you know, lead generation. Could be like onboarding and training for employees. You know, not. Not everything is, you know, has to be like, you know, marketing. Right. You know, it could be training, internal content. So, yeah, really just, you know, being an asset to them and solving a problem is the best way to keep a client.

Yeah, because I was talking to. I did a case study with Shay, one of our clients. He literally went from 0 to 12k a month in the past couple months with us. Bought a brand new BMW X4. The dude the kids ball. I wish. At 22 years old, I wish I was making freaking 15k a month. 12k a month. Like, I wish, right? I wasn't that fortunate. I was a server at a country club a long, long time ago. Like, as I. Before I started doing the freelance DP thing and starting the video business and stuff like that. But, dude, I wish I was like, I'm jealous of some of our clients who get to work with us because I'm like, dude, I wish I had this program when I first started. And that's just obviously bias coming from me because I run the program. But, like, I wish I had this because I would have made so much more money so much quicker. But for him, where was I going with that? I completely forgot. What did you say before that? Oh, just retainers.

Retainers being a, you know, being an asset to people.

Oh, yeah. So. So he. He transitioned from like, I'm just going to make content for my clients to I'm going to become A strategic content partner and create content that grows their social media, which ultimately makes them more money. Right. And because he solves a bigger problem, he's able to charge more for that.

Right.

So that's the biggest thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is like, they don't really know what problem they're solving. And they're struggling because they don't really understand how they solve that problem with video as well. At the base form, like, I was even talking to a company doing a million dollars a year, and they're just like, they don't even know what problem they're solving. They're just like, we create beautiful cinematic content. It's like, that's cool. But to become an actual business and have an actual offer offers. Solve problems, right? When you go get your haircut, solves a problem. When you go, you know, get your car washed, solves a problem. When you have somebody come work on your house, it solves a problem. Right? And I think a lot of people are not thinking in those terms as far as what problems am I actually solving for my client? So then they can't charge more because they can't leverage that. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that's a big struggle for a lot of people.

Yeah. See, someone just, you know, like, they ask if they would just want like a certain deliverable.

Right.

You know, hey, they say, hey, I.

Do video editing or hey, I do graphics or hey, I do content. It's like, cool. But what does that actually mean? Like, I had like the million dollar a year client I was talking to. They were like, yeah, like, they don't understand that, like, our quality is better. And I'm like, look, no, like, they don't care. They don't care if your quality is better. Like, they don't understand if I get the skin tones right in my, in my color grading and xyz, it's like they literally don't care about that. They just care about results. Like, it has to look good. That is the, that is the ticket to entry. Like, you have to have good quality stuff. That's like, congrats, you're in business. Right? But expect, if you're charging high, right, that's expected. But what's really expected is like, what ROI or what results am I going to get from this content and how, you know, how soon can I expect that? That's what people are paying for. At the end of the day, they're paying for result. Finished Works Inc. Says, I've been in the industry for 23 years. Long time relationships with ad agencies and long term TV production. Currently had to get a job to make ends meet. So I'm curious, like you, it sounds like you work, are you more of like a DP editor, freelancer? And that's what you're doing with the ad agencies? Because a lot of times with like TV show production, it sounds like you're probably a freelancer, a gig worker, which there's nothing wrong with. But that's different than having a business and going direct to clients. And like a lot of people are seeing these. Let me see. Said yes. Yeah, so a lot of the, a lot of people in the industry are seeing like that kind of stuff get dialed back. Because what you're doing right now. And again, there is nothing wrong with that. There are way more talented people than me at being a dp, an editor, gaffer, you know, key grip, whatever, right? But that's where you're trading your time for money. And what we're trying to do is build retainers so we can hire people under us so we don't have to trade our time for money like that. That is the idea of building a business. So when we're switching into that lens, we're switching into a place where we're saying, hey, we're going to go and find businesses. Like I'm going to go target medical businesses, right, and create content for them. And I'm going to help medical businesses get more patients with content. Then I can put together an offer like that and I can just hire a videographer to go out and do that, right? I can hire an editor to shoot the, to edit the content. I can hire a key grip, a gaffer, you know, a sound technician to go out and shoot that stuff. But the idea is that we leverage other people to buy back our time to grow a business that makes money independent of our time and our relationship with that time. Hopefully that makes sense. And then the way you get leads for that, very simple. We make the offer, right? Hey, if you're your medical businesses helping them get more patients using content, that's the offer, right? And then from there it becomes, let's run ads to medical companies. Very simple. So we look at, okay, hey, if you're a medical company, this is an ad. Hey, if you're a medical company, you're struggling with xyz, you want to get more patients, we have a content system that's going to help you get xyz. I'm just spitballing. We have a lot of clients using you know, going after medical and then when we do that, we run those ads, we get those people to then opt in to our lead form or our funnel and then we get on a zoom call with them and then we pitch them, you know, a 3, 6 or 12 month retainer. And those retainers could be like 30k, 60k, 90k for 3, 6, 12. Not to go on a rant there, but that's ultimately the system. And then you know, you get them in on a three month, you do a good job, you renew them for six and then you do a good job, you renew them for another nine and then you just over and over and over again. So then you have clients that are paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars and never leaving, but they're paying you every month. Which is a better money model. A better what do you not money model. What's the other word for business model? Thank you. Business model. It's a better business model than these one off jobs where you're trading your time for money because you're actually going direct to client. That's ultimately what we do and what our clients do. And there's nothing wrong with being a freelancer or a DP. But for me, I didn't want to be the 80 year old person on set DP who's trading his time for money and never had any time just because I love the craft and I love the art form. Like I love that shit. But like I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, handcuff myself to that at the end of the day. So hopefully that makes sense. Finish works. Sorry to go on a rant, but it's just a choice I think you have to make where it's like do you want to continue to do the ad agency stuff or do you want to continue to do the like long term TV show kind of stuff? Me either. Lol.

Yeah.

Are you a DP camera operator? Would you do everything? What do you do mainly? Yes sir. Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm curious if what kind of freelancer you are, but it's just, it's shifting from freelancer to business owner. The freelancer trades their time for money, the business owner makes money independent of their time. And then the next level to that is investor, to where your money works for you and you don't have to do anything. Right. So like there's different levels. Robert Kiyosaki's whatchamacallit. What is it Ethan? You would know that better. Four quadrants of cash flow. I Think is what it's called.

Yeah.

Oh, gotcha. I was thinking rich, rich dad, rich dad, poor dad.

Yeah, everything. Yeah. So what I would do finish works is I would, I would figure out an offer and if you want our help with this, reach out to us. We're happy to help. But figure out an offer you're going to go after. You know, home service, medical, whatever, build an offer around that and then start setting up an inbound system, a client acquisition system to get clients for that and then fulfill, do a good job with those clients and then keep them and renew them and then hire a video editor, a videographer, a CSM people on your team and admin to start building up from there. So that's what I would do. Let me scroll up here. How do you individualize your work when you're working with a client and a requires multiple different departments but you do all the departments. How would you package them all into one package? That is an interesting question. I don't know if I understand the question fully. Ethan, do you get it?

Oh, I was gonna ask you. You talking about like just different like production team roles, like different. Like when you say departments like you're talking like an audio guy, like, you know.

Yeah, I'm trying to understand that too, director. Yeah, yeah, let me see the next one. It says example. I'm making an event flyer for an artist development and I have to do each individual artist. Maybe we'll come back to that one. I don't know if I understand the question fully but I would say when it comes to picking a market, wouldn't target artists. I would target businesses because they have more money, artists are broke and never really.

That just sounds like graphic design.

Yeah, that's just like a graphic design service. So we want to figure out like what is the problem we're solving and then like just hire people to do the work for you.

Yeah, well I guess on the flip side if you could make a, you know, a commercial for it.

See I did the design. I did the design. The photography that edits the logos. Yeah, I would just say hire people to do that for you and then go get more of those types of clients if that's what you want to do. But I wouldn't target artists. Maybe elaborate for me a little bit more. I'll come back to that. What about the opposite problem? I make short form content. Mom and pop retailers. Sorry. And non profits. Is it possible to be sustainable in that niche that has high churn rate by nature? Yeah. So there's this is A good question. So there's church, there's different types of churn. There's foundational churn, which is based on the industry because the, you know, the people you're serving either go out of business, have a lot of issues, things that you can't control where, like, they just churn out because they either go out of business or very volatile or whatever. And then there's churn. That's related to how good your service is. If your service is really good, then you shouldn't have high churn. But if your service is really good and you have high churn and people are happy, you want to look at like, is the market that I'm serving the problem? Right. Because if you're serving mom and pop retailers and nonprofits, Ethan, what's the first problem with those types of people?

Is just, I mean, I mean, like, retailers, like, profit margins are low. You know, a lot of, you know, word of mouth.

They have no money.

Yeah. Just don't have any money.

It's like me going after, like, local artists. It's like, they don't really have any money. The market is just really tough.

So, like, with the, with the niches that he mentioned, it may not be like churn rate. It could also just be lifetime value of the client as well.

Yeah. I'm curious, what is your lifetime value, Fernando? What is the, like, what's the LTV of a customer? Drop that down below. I would just say you need to switch your niche because mom and pop retailers and nonprofits, like, they're not going to always make enough money off of your, like, let's use the example, right? You do a video for a coffee shop. The coffee shop sells some more coffees. Each coffee is $5. Let's say that coffee shop makes like a hundred bucks off of the new traffic that you bring them through the video. It's like a hundred bucks. It's not that much. Right. You can't charge much for that video because there's not really a big result. Now let's say you do a, the same type of video, same amount of effort, same amount of work, but you do it for a home builder and they get five more homes that they sell, and each home is 500 grand. Like, you can charge a lot more for the same exact work. The only difference between those two is one of the per. Like the. The one market on this side is just a better market. It's a better person to target. They make more money. It's easier to target rich clients than it is broke Clients. That's a writer downer. I would write that down. It's easier to charge and make more money off of rich clients than it is off of poor broke clients. Because the low ticket clients want every last ounce of your energy, and they also don't make that much money. So it's not justifiable to them to spend 20 grand on a video and.

Just solve bigger problems, too.

And solve bigger problems. Exactly, Exactly. Yeah. About $500 for video content. And the hilarious thing is, and we do this for our clients, it literally is not any more work to do this for a better client. Like, the work is almost exactly the same. The only reason you can charge instead of 500, you could charge 5,000 or $15,000 for a video is because the person that you're making it for is more valuable. They are richer, they make more money. All you have to do is say, if we sold one home using this video, how much money would you guys make in profit? 100 grand. Okay, the video is 10 grand. If we get you one more home client or one more home sold, then would this be worth it? Yes or no? Yes. Boom. Right there. Just easier. It's just easier. Guys, like, don't fight an uphill battle. I've been there. It's not worth it working for those types of people. Like, it's just, it's a race to the bottom. It is absolutely exhausting. Hopefully that makes sense. How do you know which niche to attack if it's big enough, if it's a big enough one for where you live? How do you identify that? So, Christian, good question. Main, main kind of questions here you want to be asking is you want to be looking for service based businesses that charge a higher ticket amount of money for something that they sell. So like, think home service companies, lawyers, medical clinics, like boring local businesses that charge a high ticket amount of money for something that they do. Dentists. Right. Those types of markets are perfect because there's a lot of those types of people and they charge a high ticket amount of money for their service. And they're everywhere. And like Graham, one of our clients is literally in maine. There's like 200,000 people there. And he's added like 350k to his video business. Like literally just serving local businesses. Boring, boring ass businesses like that. Like, that's what I would be looking at. And ask yourself, like, is this a market that's growing? Is this a market that has money? Is this a market that's easy to target through ads? If the answer to all of those is. Is. Yes. Then that's a market you should go after. Ethan, anything to add there?

No, no. That was everything I was going to say too.

Took the words right out of your mouth, man. There we go. My targeted niche is event coverage. I produce promo videos, event recaps for music festivals. I've seen a lot of emails and demo reels to other festivals, but I'm not getting much back. What should I do? So that's a niche problem to me because the problem is with event coverage, how much money are they really making off of your content and how justifiable is the roi? Right. It's just difficult because unless you can prove, hey, we made this event, you know, we sold an extra hundred thousand tickets or we sold XYZ or whatever, right. Like, unless we have justifiable results, it's harder to charge a higher ticket about money. I would suggest switching your niche to a higher ticket niche, not event coverage. And music festivals are just tough because there's a lot of people that want to create content like that. And you know, there's a lot of supply and not a lot of demand and they don't really make a lot of money off of it. So it's just difficult. Is it, is it worth joining my local chamber of Commerce to network and bring in more clients, how to show my value on social media? Any advice on YouTube? Those are a lot of questions. That's. Those are a lot, lot of different buckets. We can go into them though. Ethan, you want to hit the Chamber of Commerce?

Yeah, start from the top. Worth joining local Chamber of Commerce? Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth it, you know, if, you know, kind of in the beginning stages of things. It's like Eric, you know, Joe, he got a ton of deals from his local BNI group. I mean, he was raking in with them. So I think it's a great place to get started with, you know, do some lower priced work, get some testimonials, generate results for people and then you can start to, you know, charge higher prices. Because if I don't know how many testimonials you might have. But that's a huge piece of the puzzle.

Yeah, yeah. It's just at scale, I wouldn't do Chamber of commerce, but when you're getting started, that's fine because the problem is, is like you have to go to a lot of chamber of commerce events to generate leads. And like, for me, I don't really want to have to go to events to generate leads. It's just It's a lot of work. I would switch into running like an inbound paid ad system to get leads once you have case studies like Ethan said. So show your value on social media to book more clients. Talk about client results. Talk about like make a list of all the problems or questions that your market has and make short reels covering those topics and answering those questions. Right. That's another really good way to do that.

And then first you know from the first question to use those testimonials.

Yep. Yeah. And cut those up into short form content. Put it on your social media. Advice on using YouTube, same thing, just long form. So like make long form videos answering questions and educating the market around problems that you solve. And then that's a good way to educate the market and nurture them before they get on a call with you. I'm chasing the artist managers, club promoter and owner event. In other words, I, yeah, I would just switch your, your niche there, man. I don't want to chase artist managers or club promoters or any of that crap. Like it's just, it's too much and they're just, it's a lot of work for not a lot of money. So I would say just switch over to like service based businesses and, and do the same thing but find a way to package it for them to make it valuable to them because like these guys, they're just not worth it. They're a lot of talk and no money.

Cool guys.

What other questions do we have before we jump off here? Get some good questions today. The, the TLDR is like just target better people. Like you could waste so much of your life targeting broke clients and literally scraping for pennies. Or you could just charge people that have money and solve a better problem for them. That's it. Like there's just no point in like wasting your time with people who are broke. So. All right guys, that's it for this one. Let me know if you need anything. If you want to learn more about what we actually do at Master Filmmaker, there should be a link below this video. If you're on Instagram, go to my link and buy file. Schedule a demo call with our team. Happy to help. See if we could help. We've helped over 582 video business owners at this point get more clients. I'm about to release another case study today how we helped one of our clients get from 0 to 12k a month. You've also, if you're on Instagram, you've probably seen my annoying ads everywhere. So I'M going to keep sending those to you until you book a call with us, and we'll help you get to that next level and get you more clients. So if you want to learn more, link in bio on Instagram, link below this video. If you want to schedule a call with our team, and we're happy to help point you in the right direction and see if we can get you some resources from there. So. All right, guys, let me know if there's any other questions that you have, and we will see you in the next live.

Sweet. You guys, your love is life? Yeah? Love this life? Yeah, love this life? Cause I love this life? It feels alright? And there's no reason to fight the feeling? If you're just right? It feels all right? Get love this life? Get love this life?