Scaling Secrets: Who to Hire First as Your Video Business Grows

Hey, what's going on everyone? So in this video I want to go over the organization chart or structure based on your current revenue and who you should be looking at hiring first and how you should start taking yourself out of certain roles within your business. So this, I'm going to put numbers on this. I want to preface this with these are just estimations. These are not hard and fast. Oh, you know, I'm at 24,500. I can't do this thing. Just these are kind of estimates. So take it with a grain of salt as far as the estimates, but understand the concepts of what I'm trying to explain here. So then you can take this implement into your own business and then obviously be able to hire the right people to get stuff off of your plate. Okay, so first thing we want to do is look at phase one. So there are three main buckets that you're going to fall into when it comes to hiring different types of people. So there's marketing, sales, fulfillment, those are the only three buckets. So marketing to start at 10 to 25k a month, marketing is really just going to be you. So there's typically a marketing director who there's other roles I'm going to speak in terms of video businesses, content agencies and people who have smaller departments and smaller businesses. Usually it's just marketing. Marketing director is you. Then we go into sales. Right. So typically within sales there's a sales manager. And then in this type of model you have an appointment setter and a closer which all of these three things are going to be you right now. So sales manager is you. You're setting the appointments, you're taking the appointments, you're closing the appointments, everything. And then in the fulfillment side, typically the client's success director is going to be you as well, the account manager is going to be you, and the videographer is going to be you as well. The first thing we recommend doing is hiring an editor to get the editing off your plate because it's the most time consuming task and it doesn't make you any more money in the business. It's really easy to find cheap editors who are really good. And if you're between 10 and 25k a month, I'd highly suggest hiring an editor first to get this stuff off your plate. And obviously we're going to have SOPs going over how to hire an editor, how to vet, how to train, how to communicate with them, and we have all of that in the modules below this video. So, so next phase is going to be the 25k to 60k a month mark. Again, these are just estimates, but at this point you're typically going to hire a videographer as well. So someone to go out on the projects to shoot and someone to edit it. And the reason we do this is because when you have a videographer go out on the shoots, that saves you a ton of time to then take that time and invest that time back into sales to grow the business to get more clients. So if you look at the theme here, I want to remove myself from all of the fulfillment tasks as soon as possible so I can focus on making the business more money and making more sales in the business to then get more money to hire more people. That's the whole point here is like think of it as a football team, right? So at first you're, you're the quarterback, you're the running back, you're everybody, you're just trying to get the ball down the field. And then as you start to build more revenue, you have more money to hire more players on the team. So now you could hire a better quarterback than you. Now you could hire a better running back than you. Now you can hire better defensive line than you, right? So we're building up this revenue and our only goal is to make more money in the business so we can hire more people in the business to start taking ourselves out of things. But the last thing we ever take ourselves out of is revenue generating opportunities and revenue generating tasks. So you're going to stay in sales for as long as humanly possible. Because while fulfillment is important, it's not the thing that makes the direct money upfront. Obviously, like doing a good job prevents refunds, it helps renewals, it helps resigns, it's all of that. But fulfillment doesn't directly make money. And I can hire people who are videographers and editors to then do the tasks for me so then I can make more money in the business and focus on sales, right? So at stage 2, 25k to 60k a month, typically we're going to hire, like I said, a videographer. We're already going to have an editor. And you may have more than one, depending on how many clients that you have. But then you're still the account manager, you're still the client success director, you're still the sales manager, you're still the appointment setter, you're still the closer, and you're still a marketing director. Meaning like you're recording the ads, you're editing the ads, you're putting those out, you're running, you're buying the media, you're running everything, right? So you're still doing all the marketing and all the sales, but you're starting to take fulfillment off your plate. Now we look at phase 3. This is around 60k a month to 100k a month. And so what we did in this phase is we hired an account manager. Now you may be asking, what is an account manager? Well, an account manager is simply someone who communicates with the client and is the liaison between the client and the video and editing team. So let's say the client closes, you close them. You would then pass them off to the account manager. The account manager would take them through their Monday board, their client journey, whatever it is that you have set up on the back end. And then that account manager would then basically delegate the tasks of hey, so and so who's the videographer you're going out to shoot on these days for this project? And then the editor would then send that content. The account manager would then take the content the videographer made, send it to the editor, instruct the editor on what it is that they need to do, and then basically the editor would send the revisions to the account manager who would then send it back to the client and get feedback from the client and then send that back to the account manager. And the account manager would send the feedback to the editors and the videographers as well, depending on what they need. The account manager is basically like a client success person who would then be doing the daily back and forth between the clients and making sure that everybody's happy. And typically we have them in a slack channel with the client and they're making sure that the client has everything and they're on top of everything. And then you're typically the client success director is the person managing the account managers. And so typically that's still you. And you're doing all the sales and you're doing all the marketing. And in here I added media buyer and in house media creation team. Typically for an in house media creation team, that's someone who's like editing your ads or someone who's shooting your ads. It's a media team who's doing that. And the media buyer is still you. And the in house creation team is still you as well. You're fielding the leads, taking the leads, closing the leads, and then you've just relieved yourself of a little bit of duty over here with as the account manager and you have someone who's managing that as well. And typically here you have enough margin to be able to pay these three roles. Now when you get above 100k a month, you can get to about 100k a month with this model. And then at 100 to 150k a month, you're typically going to want to start looking at an appointment setter, someone who can field the appointments and qualify them and then put them on your calendar. And then you still have the same team as well on the fulfillment team. So I've added a commission only appointment setter, someone who can call the leads, vet the leads and then make sure that they are quality. So then I can take the leads and close them as well. And then typically at stage five, this is when you would hire a closer as well, which is probably one of the more difficult hires because this is the last person who's going to be generating revenue for you before the like when the lead comes in, this is the person who could make or break your sales. So that's why it's a little bit more important to find a good closer. And then you also are still, you're still the client success director, you're still the sales manager and then you're still the marketing director as well. But you've also hired, you could potentially hire a media buyer as well, someone who can run your ads on a daily basis and, and then you could also have someone who is helping you shoot and create the ads on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis to then create that content, whether it's short form content for your social media or it's the ads that you're putting out for your company. So let me know if that makes sense. This is a 30,000 foot view of the different phases we typically start with. We like to start by handing off fulfillment first and then working our way to hand off sales. I know a lot of creatives don't necessarily want, they just want to hand off sales right off the bat. But they, but the biggest thing we see with that, the magic of you selling what it is that you do for your clients is kind of lost when you hire someone right off the bat and you don't take the time to do that yourself and keep yourself in revenue generating activities. Basically what we see is we see people pass off the revenue generating activities too soon and basically their revenue goes down, but their expenses go up and it just, it hurts margins a lot. So you want to stay in sales and marketing for as long as possible because you're typically the face of the business at this point. So let me know if you have any questions and we'll see in the next video. I hope you enjoyed that training. 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