Live Q&A - Scaling Video Agency

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 but we're 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 this feeling? Cause I love this life? Everything's all right? And there's no reason to stop believing? The love is light and the future's bright? And there's no reason to fight this feeling. Yeah, love this life. Yeah, love this life. Ye love this life. Love this life.

What's going on, guys? We are back for another live. Me and Ethan jumping on here. We're live on Instagram over here and we got Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, all the things. Ethan, what's going on, dude? How are you?

Good, man. It's been a. I feel like I say this every week. It's a quick week.

Quick week. Yeah, I know. Seriously, what's been going on in your, your neck of the woods here?

Oh, just the usual, you know, sales and offers and. I know, we were talking about it this morning, just, you know, keeping on with follow up is a huge thing for people and just sales process, stuff like that.

Yeah. So for sure, for sure. I'm getting everybody in here. I just posted in the school group. Happy out of three. Yo, what's going on, dude? How are you? Good to see you again. I think you were on last week. We're gonna answer any questions you guys have for the next like 15ish minutes around scaling your video business, getting more clients, getting more leads. I'm gonna go over a couple of wins in the channel to get us kicked off here and then we will rock and roll from there. Let's go ahead and pull this up here. Give me a sec. Here we go. What is going on, Juco? Let me get this pulled up here, guys. One sec. And while I'm doing that, if you guys have any questions for me or for Ethan, feel free to pop that down below and we are happy to help you guys. WINS channel. Cool. You guys can see this. We got Tony. Someone clicked his ad last night. Self booked a meeting for today. Just got done speaking with him for 45 minutes. I said that's how it's supposed to work, right? Didn't close, but he booked a follow up meeting for next week which is huge. Which I just love to. I love to show people this because I'm like, you can have ads having people just book on your calendar, people who are interested. Right. You have a conversation, see if it's a good fit, and, and then you continue that on. In the deal. In the deal process. Right. Didn't close that one yet, but he's working on it for next week. Sarah Peacock said she had a five minute call with a practice manager of her IVF clinic and they're interested in booking a discovery call. She was nervous to even mention it, but then she seemed to think it's a really good idea to elevate their brand, which is huge. And, and I said, don't be afraid to talk about how much value you can provide people, because if you truly believe in what you can do, then it's your job to talk about it. Right. So that's huge. Next win would be Shabib had a reactivation with a former client, which is huge. Robert got his first couple of Facebook ad leads that he just launched. They booked calls. Tom said they had a lead book in, but they use the sales strategies that we kind of taught them to successfully book the sales call and they're very excited to close. Jamarcus closed a 15k retainer. Benjamin, I love this. This was funny. Got off a call with him on last week and he had a bunch of leads that he had gotten from the ads, but he hadn't, he hadn't turned a lot of them into sales calls. So I think he had like 15 leads, but he only booked like three sales calls. And I was like, well, why aren't you calling the leads? Right? He's like, well, I called him off my personal phone, but I didn't call him through the CRM. I said, just call him through the CRM. He called them and he said he, he triaged eight of them and then he booked five qualified appointments for next week. Right. Just huge. So he has five more sales calls and opportunities to close people. And I always say, I say this to everybody. Call your damn leads when they're coming in. Make sure you're hitting them, you're paying for them. Right. Call them when they come in. Have a conversation. In the day and age of like, there's no personalization to anything. Call people, talk to them, see if you can help them, get them on a sales call. Right. Just huge. Ethan, you say that all the time too, you know.

Yeah, every day.

Yeah. Yep. And it's, it's the frame of they reached out to you. Right. So you have to have that frame of like, they reached out to you, not the other way around. Right. So remember that like they reached out to you, they're interested in talking with you. And this is when inbound leads are coming in through your ads. So like don't be afraid to reach back out to them. They're the ones though who reached out to you in the first place. Just remember that frame.

It's not a cold call. You're not.

Yeah, it's not a cold call because they booked in with you or they reached out to you. Right. So Matt Stone closed the month out with 22k in revenue. He's aiming for 30 or 40k this month in August, which is going to be huge, which I love. Sebastian closed the 10K package with the Haiti foundation and Cameron got two new leads. Let's see if there's any. Oh, and then Chandler closed a 55k deal and was working on some of the sales stuff there, which is huge. So those are our wins. Guys, let's jump into some questions. What questions do you guys have around scaling your video business? Getting more leads, getting more calls, charging higher prices, maybe transitioning from one offs into retainers. Like ping us in the comments. We're happy to help. Otherwise we're just gonna yap about some stuff here. So unless you just want to hear us yap about random stuff, I'd encourage you to drop some question down below. Cool. Let's see. Okay, cool. I'm gonna pull up a couple things here from Slack Questions. While we're waiting on some questions here. Let me pull it up. Ethan, any major things that you're kind of running into on calls? I know when I was talking on my, my coaching call yesterday, I was really talking about building a gap with people. Right. And selling based on the process of what you're going to do. Instead of like, oh, this is what it was. Cameron was asking me about guarantees. He's like, should I ask or should I tell people about my guarantee? And I dove deeper into what he was asking and basically the person wasn't sold yet, but they were using this as, they were using the guarantee as kind of like a crutch, if that makes sense. Right.

Without really, it's like a, that's like a trick up your sleeve kind of thing. Like use it as you need to because they should trust the process before I need to give this. Like, you know, like it's like a.

Like they don't, they, they don't believe in the process or the content you're going to create for them to help them scale their business by by slapping a guarantee on it doesn't help you. Right. Doesn't make. It doesn't make them want to buy more. Until you address the root problem, which is you don't feel like this content can actually help you get more sales. And until you can address that root problem in the sales call, they're not going to buy. Right. So you have to address that issue first. That's the main thing. Yeah, it's kind of a. Yeah.

Kind of a safety net.

Yeah. It's like, oh, I didn't. I didn't really sell you on how. Or explain how this is going to help you get more leads or more calls or more sales. But, you know, we have a guarantee. It's like, okay, cool. But like, the guarantee doesn't help me because I don't believe what you're going to do is actually going to help me make more money.

Yeah, I don't want it to begin with. Yeah, yeah, Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly. Yep.

Coach Valley. Coach, Coachella Valley Media says I'm about to walk into an electrician company and try to convince them to hire me as a 1099 to deliver 12 reels a month instead of hiring somebody part time. That's great. I would say, I don't know if you've had a discovery with them or you've had a sales call with them. Biggest thing is what are those 12 reels going to do for them? What is the outcome that you are selling out of that? Because it's not about the 12 reels. Nobody cares about that. No one cares about content at all. They care about what does the content do for them. Right. So Coachella Valley Media, I would say go in there and start asking questions around. How are they getting leads right now? Are they getting leads from social media? Are they posting content right now? How much money do they feel like they're leaving on the table by not posting content every single month, every single week? Are competitors of theirs, Right. Are competitors of theirs posting content maybe taking some leads and they're falling behind because they're not posting content?

Right.

And so you really need to dig deeper. You said recognition. Yes, but you need to go beyond that. What does recognition mean for them? It means more leads. So you have to quantify it better. You can't just say recognition, because that doesn't really mean anything. You have to say, okay, how is this going to generate them? And show them how this is going to generate them. More leads, more calls, more sales. Right. If it's an electrician company, how are they going to get More jobs out of it. How are they going to get more people to call them with electric jobs or electrician jobs? Right. How are we going to. How is that going to correlate into them actually making more money? You have to be able to show them that. Otherwise they're always going to. They're always going to push you down as far as price because they don't actually see how you're going to help them achieve some sort of result. Right. And that's where you have to understand the back end of how to use content, how to use content selling systems, how to run ads for people and how to do all that so you can actually generate them what they care about the most, which is more leads. Right. Recognition doesn't mean anything. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. And it has to be quantified into something like leads, calls, sales. So I would go into that and just show them how you can. How these reels are going to actually help them generate more sales, more calls, and more jobs. And then what does the math look like on that?

Right.

I was talking to Matt Stone about it. He popped on my coaching call the other day. But he does something on his sales calls, which I think is great, where he actually does the math. It's called, and we call it kind of the do the math close. Right. So when he hops on a call with a potential client, he says, hey, what, you know, how much do you charge for your service? Oh, we charge, you know, 10k. Great. Okay. So how many of those clients. He basically does the math on how many clients they would need to pay for his video services. Right. Which is huge. So he's like, if I'm charging them 20k, then I would say, hey, you just need two clients at 10k. So because you charge 10k a month, you need two clients paying you for this entire thing to ROI. Right. And so I think that's really powerful mindset shift. It's so obvious, but I don't think a lot of people think about that. You know what I mean?

Yep. That's something. I walked everybody through on the sales calls. Like, there's the emotional part and then there's also the logistical part too. And, you know, a great question as well is, you know, hey, let's say I brought you 10 leads, right. How many of them do you feel like you could close?

Yep. And then most people are overzealous. They're like, I close 100. That's not realistic. Let's say you close 30. 30, right. So three of those leads you closed at 10K. Great. So then what? You know, how much does that equal in sales for you? Well, you know, each client for us is 10k, so that'd be 30k in sales. Okay, so then if you spend 20k on this video package or this content system and you only closed 30k, would you be happy with that? Yes or no? Yeah, absolutely, I would. Okay, great. So you just have to do the math for them. And even more than that, you have to make them do the math themselves. Because if you tell them, nobody believes you. But if they tell themselves, then they believe it. Right. Because they're saying it themselves. I ask questions to get people to convince themselves of whatever thing I want them to be convinced of. So you have to ask them those questions. Well, for someone who films content for musicians, is recognition a reasonable goal? You have to tie it back to money. Like, there's three outcomes in any offer. It's health, wealth, relationships. And so you're not selling them on relationships with your content, you're not selling them on health with your content, you're selling them on wealth. So you have to. For musicians, which. This is why it's harder and why we don't recommend targeting musicians. Because, like, most musicians are broke. They don't have the money to pay you. And so you're working really, really hard for a demographic or a niche that can't afford to pay you. Right. And so, but if you were to do that, you'd have to tie in. How does this content equal more money for the musician? Like, you have to explain that to me in two sentences. And if you can't do that, you might want to consider changing your niche to somebody else.

It's got to be like ticket sales or, like, money you make on, like, Spotify streams.

That's not a lot. Yeah, that's the problem with that. You don't make a ton on that. So that's. That's the difficult part. Like, if there's anything you guys take from this live. When you're selling content to a client, you have to very easily say, this is how it's going to make you more money. That's it. This is how it's going to make you more money. Very simple. If you can do that, they will buy. If you can show them how it's going to make them at least two or three times what they're going to pay you, they will pay for it every single time or a very high likelihood of the time. Right. You have to show them that and the problem is, where most of you guys struggle, and I was here myself, too, is you can't show them or justify to them how you're going to make more money for them. And then there's this, like, ambiguity, and they're confused and they don't get it. And then they're like, you know what? I need to think about it. This is too much money. It's too expensive. Let me talk to my dog. Let me talk to my wife. Let me talk to my wife's uncle's dog, right? And it's like you. You get all these objections because they don't actually believe they're going to make more money. Like, imagine if I was selling somebody. I mean, we're all video people here. Let's say I was gonna sell you, like, a red Komodo for, like, a thousand dollars. Like, do I really have to do a lot of selling there? No, because it's like, I don't even know what they run these days. It's like a $20,000 camera, right? And if I was gonna sell it to you for a thousand dollars, you're gonna take that every day of the week because you know what you're paying for far exceeds the value of what you're paying for. I'm paying $1,000 to get a $20,000 camera. Like, I could. Like, I could do nothing else in that sales conversation. And you would buy that because the value is there.

The Lambo close.

Exactly. It's just you have to position your content services as something that is far more valuable than what you're actually charging for it. And if you can't show them how it's going to make them more money, it's going to be very difficult for you to do that. Right. Let's answer some questions here. What are some recommendations you guys have for someone starting out, maybe to speed up progress? It's a little bit vague. Brandon, if you can give us a little bit more of, like, a pointed question on that. Like, speed up progress with what? Like, getting more leads, getting more clients, getting more sales. Like, what is that? What does that mean? If you can drop me some clarification there, I'm happy to answer that. But pick a niche. Get case studies in the niche, and then charge retainer. Like, charge retainer prices 5 to 10k a month for a certain amount of content. That's going to help them actually get more leads. Run ads for them. Right? Rinse, repeat. Get as many clients as you can. Do a good job for those clients. Keep them from Churning and then you have a business, that's it.

Right.

But if you have specific kind of questions in that, I'll dive deeper, but I need a little bit more clarity on that.

Yep.

David Tinoco. What's up, dude? David's one of our clients. What's going on, man? Looks like he's tagging some people here on Facebook. I can't see the Facebook stuff. Got some Facebook viewers. I just can't see what's going on on Facebook as much. Bro, how do you. Bro, bro, bro. What's up? How do you track what leads come in from social media content? It's like running a TV commercial. If my goal is to get them leads, I would run Legion ads. Yeah, the easiest way is to run Legion ads. But another way to do it is like if you're using ManyChat, you can tag them with UTM parameters based on which ManyChat sequence they come through. And then you can put a UTM parameter per piece of content that you're posting. So you know which person comes from which piece of content and is it content that you created for the client versus what the client created? Right. So that's the easiest way to track from organic content is using UTM parameters. But if not, you're using some sort of lead gen form Legion campaign. And that's going to help you actually track how many leads you got and then what they are, where they're coming from. What industry is going to pay 5, 10k a month for content? Love it. Medical, law firm, home service. We have people working with retirement homes, home builders, plastic surgeons, any kind of elective medical private practice. Ethan, am I forgetting any others besides this?

No, I mean, yeah, any, like medical and home service.

That's.

There's such a broad.

Yeah.

Umbrella of terms like even just, I mean, look around your house.

There's companies that do flooring, roofing companies, flooring companies. Like it literally doesn't matter. Like any, any service based business that sells something for a high ticket amount of money, over $2,000 is typically who you're targeting. Because if they're selling something for over $2,000, when I get into a sales conversation with them, I can be like, hey, how much do you charge? Oh, we charge 5k per client. Great. If this video could get you 10 clients paying you 5k, that's 50k. I charge 10k for my, for my, my content. My content system. It's an easy sell. Right now if you're targeting a coffee shop, it's like each client pays us five bucks. It's like, okay, that's going to be a lot harder for me to get you an ROI from the content because you need thousands of customers to even roi, right? Painting contracts? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We have clients. We have a client doing 50k a month in just home service in like the DMV area. And all he works with is contractors for home service. Like, that's it. He runs ads for them, he creates content for them. Like, it's nothing special. So yeah, definitely painting. Yeah. So nothing arts related. Yeah. Because you have to think about it, like, who is the end user? If the end user is not gonna. If they're not making money or the end user or your client, your ideal client is broke, then like, you're gonna have to do a hell of a lot of work for no money. And like, I don't want to work for broke clients. It's exhausting. Like, why would you want to do that? So it's like, do your art stuff on the side, make money in the main business, do your art stuff on the side and then take the money from the, the main kind of boring content that you shoot and then go fund your own passion projects.

Right.

We're here to make money, not to, not to just like make beautiful art. Like beautiful art is cool, but like, I want to make money and like everyone that works with us wants to make money. Like that's, that's how the world works. Right. So.

Yep.

What cameras you recommend putting in multiple angles in a room? Small. Which cameras do you recommend to put in multiple angles in a room? Small. In a room. In a small room. I think they mean to record podcasts. It doesn't really matter. I mean, the Blackmagic Pocket 4Ks are good. The 6Ks are good. You can use Canon. You'd use like a Atem Mini Pro switcher, which I have down here, and then you'd mix it together that. I mean, there's a lot of different videos on how to do that. I'm not really the guy for the gear. I'm more of the business stuff. So. Cool. Let's see. When reaching out to a prospect as a case study, how do you go about figuring out what piece of revenue. Revenue generating content to make for them? Depends on the problem. Right. So what's their main problem? So are they having a problem generating leads? Are they having a problem nurturing those leads? Are they having a problem on the back end when leads become a client and like training the people that work for them? Right. Because it depends on what the problem Is business is just a business is a slew of bottlenecks. So if it's like a lead gen problem, you need to create ads and run ads for them, get them more leads. If it's like they have enough leads but they're not converting the leads, then you need like a brand video or testimonial content to then nurture the leads to get them to buy. If it's like I have a bunch of, you know, people who are untrained on my team, then you need to create training videos. Right? It depends on the problem. It's all contextual. So that's what, that's what matters the most. Have you had any prospect decline your offer to make a piece of revenue generating content for them stating they don't know if it makes sense? Yeah, I mean for sure. And the reason they would do that is because even if you're doing it for free, it still costs them. Excuse me, it still costs them time. And if they are not convinced that this piece of content will generate them more revenue, then they're not going to spend their time doing it. So you didn't do a good enough job on that sales call convincing them that this is actually going to move the needle in some way, shape or form in their business. Right. It's like if I came to you, happy dad of three and I was like, hey, I'm going to create this video for you. And you're like, well, what's it going to do? You're like, I don't know, I'm not sure. But it'll look cool, it's going to be really nice. It's like clients are like, okay, cool, but like that, I don't care. It's not going to make me more money. Why do I care about that? So you didn't do a good enough job of showing them how it's going to actually help them make more money.

Right.

That's the big piece there. Let's see. I own a business, I'm expanding. I went on. Indeed. And all these businesses are looking for content creators. My question isn't how to convince them they need content, it's how to convince them to out. I think outsource is what you mean. Yeah. So I mean it really just depends. If you're looking at these businesses, I would at least reach out to them and set up a call. It's not about convincing them to outsource, it's about getting a call with them, building a gap and discovery, understanding how you can actually help them. And then if it makes sense for them, then they will outsource it. Right? Let's see. Trying to seek out case studies. But I guess I did not realize that you needed to figure out if they had a problem. Yeah, I mean, business is just problems. That's it. And like you guys aren't providing video content, you're solving problems. That's it. You're solving business problems. And the sooner that you can flip into that switch, that switch in your brain where like, you're not a content creator, you're not a video production company, you're a business problem solver and whatever video plugs in to solve that problem is the video you're going to make. Right? So you have to fix that kind of mindset, otherwise you're always going to be stuck in low, low paying jobs. I just started my production company. Should I focus on getting a next camera or production cart? You should focus on none of those things. Because if you don't have any paying clients, none of it matters. Right? Say it with me. You don't need more gear, you need more clients. Right? I'm very passionate about this. And whether that's learning from us on YouTube or, or from somebody else, it doesn't matter. You can literally rent all the gear you need until you have enough profit to buy your own, like gear. This is the biggest thing, like I was in this phase as a DP for a very long time. I get it. Gear is cool. But if you have no money and you have no clients, all of your attention and time should be focused on getting more clients or learning a system to get more clients. You can always rent gear. You can rent gear once they pay you for the shoot.

Your, your clients don't care what gear you have. They don't know.

You have to have something decent. You have to have a decent quality of work. Focus on marketing and sales for your business, getting those clients right, learning that, and then you can just rent gear until you have enough money to buy gear. Like that's what the smartest move is. What most people do is they spend all their money on gear, then they have no money to market or learn the skills that they need to actually learn how to market and sell. So then they're just this company with 30 or 40k in a year, but no freaking idea how to actually market themselves. Like I see that time and time again. So like focus on learning how to get leads, how to talk to leads, how to sell them a package, how to conduct a sales call, like how to close them on a package, how to send them an agreement. Like these are the things that are the most important. You can hire a videographer who has their own gear too to shoot it for you once you have the money. Tori, one of Our clients, closed three I'm sorry, two 45k deals, has never shot video before and just hired a videographer for like a thousand dollars on each project and then she profited 44k on each project, had no idea how to shoot the content she was selling, she just sold it and then she hired somebody to do it for her.

Yep. You just have to communicate value is the main thing.

Like that is the person who makes the money and the person who can communicate the value the clearest is the person who's going to make the most money, not the person with the most gear or how pretty your content is. Like, we've talked to a lot of video agencies over the years, like 11,000 of them to this point because we booked that many calls and we've seen a lot of companies that have amazing work but literally have no money left in the bank because they didn't learn the skills on how to market and sell. Right.

So yep, one. And the other thing too is it doesn't matter if you're shooting 4K. IPhones don't have a 4K screen, so you can't.

Well, some, yeah. I mean some do.

Right.

But some, it's not even about that like you. It's just more about learning how to actually get these clients on retainer and then being able to pivot that person into a long term contract review you. And once you have someone paying you 10k a month, you can buy all the gear you want. Like you got my full permission. That's cool.

Yeah, well, yeah, the quality doesn't matter.

How much do you guys value keeping real TV techniques like proper framing and it. That's a good question. It doesn't. We haven't really seen it matter too much. It's more about the strategy. Like are you hooking the viewer in the first three seconds? Are you solving some sort of problem? Do you have some sort of payoff in the content? Like that matters more than like framing and composition. It's. I think that's the wrong question to be asking. Is Google Ads the best tool to market? Usually meta is an easier place to start. Meta. Meta ads. We got to run here guys. But if there's any other questions you have, drop them and we'll try to answer them very quickly here. Otherwise, if you want to learn more about how we can help you can click the link below, schedule call with our team or you can go to the link in my bio head. Happy to help. You can schedule a call there and then we'll be able to see if we can help. And then there's also free content on my YouTube channel teaching you all different sales techniques, how to build a funnel, how to build an inbound system to get more calls, booking on your calendar. All that fun jazz. With that being said, though, guys, if there's no other questions, we're going to let you guys run. We got to get back to client work here and helping our clients scale. And if there's anything else you guys need, let us know. Talk to you in a bit.

Love this life it feels all right and there's no reason Just stop believing life is life and the future's bright and there's no reason to fight this yeah love this life yeah love this life yeah love this life yeah love this life Sam.