Scaling Your Video Business

Yeah, I'm feeling like a brand new me I blew away the clouds I was standing under Traded all my rainy days for a little summer I fly so high right now that I might not come back down Listen to my.

What is going on? Everyone? We are back for another live. We're hanging with you guys. We're here on Instagram, we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch. Maybe we're not on Twitch. Maybe next time. I don't know what's going on. Guys, we got Evan, we got Ethan, we got part of the team from master filmmaker here, and we're here to answer any questions you have around scaling your video business in 2025. We've heard a lot of amazing goals from people and numbers they want to hit. And we want to hear from you guys and hear from everyone on Instagram and see what you guys are trying to hit in 2025 and what you're looking to go to. I know some people are just getting in, but, Evan, what are some of the big goals you've heard for 2025 from some of the people you've been talking to?

Man, Most recently, I heard. Can't remember who it was. Somebody shooting for 50k months.

Let's go.

I can't remember who it was. It'll, you know, probably by the end of this call come back to my head. But yeah, that's, that's, that's one that I, that I can remember.

Okay. But I saw the Brandon link and he was 18k a month. Right. Now, I believe in recurring revenue. Went through his numbers and showed him how we're going to scale that to 50 to 100k a month and that's the goal for 2025. So we're pumped about that.

Nice.

Yeah, nice. Yeah. He works with primarily home service businesses, but he's been absolutely crushing it on his retainers with them. Clients are super happy. He helped one of his clients do like, go from literally like he added a million dollars to their business in six months with his ads and with his content, which is huge, right?

Yeah.

He's getting a case study with them and I think he said he's done. He's added 60k in revenue in the past three weeks with us. Yeah, that's amazing. It's huge. Ethan, what are some of the things you're hearing? What are some of the biggest goals?

I think, yeah, just some of the classics. You know, more money, more monthly recurring revenue is a big thing.

Yep.

I think just people getting their time back too. Getting out of the day to day operations so much and being an owner and not, you know, an employee.

Yeah. If you guys are watching, drop a comment down below, let us know what is your goal for 2025? What do you want to hit as far as revenue and what are some other maybe goals you have like more time with the family not being so wrapped up in the business all the time. Like let us know some of the things that you guys are shooting for in 2025. We'd love to know. And then if you have questions, we'll answer those as well. See you guys here on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and then Instagram over here. If you have some questions or goals for 2025, drop them down below, let us know. Pull this up here. Yeah, and to go off that point too, Ethan, like buying back your time, it is huge because like I think too many people are working in the business, not working on it. What are some things people do that means they're working in the business that you see?

I mean it could be, you know, a lot of things whether it's, you know, still editing their own content. I know that's a big time consuming aspect especially in the industry that we work in that just, you know, especially in the day and age of short form content, it's just such a volume game for a lot of people where it's just takes so much time. Yep, that's a big thing. But it could also be taking sales calls or people going out to shoot for. You know, I think I was looking.

At what are things you're doing within the business that are not revenue generating. Right. So it's like what are we doing that doesn't make us money? Very simple. I see some people on here, I see Naru Pratish, I see Matt Hadley. What's going on dude? Milan Marketing and media. What are some things you guys are doing in your business that don't make you money? Drop some comments down below. What are some non revenue generating activities? Because I want you guys to think in this, in this term, right? Because like if we're not spending time on things that make us money, then we're not going to make more money. It's pretty simple, right Evan, what are some things that maybe you see that people are doing that don't make them more money?

Things that they're not doing?

Things that they're doing.

Sorry, things that they're doing that, that don't make them more money. So like Ethan said, like editing their own stuff, right? Like their own marketing assets. But also in trying to get into more of a growth model. Right. Taking them out of the fulfillment aspect of the clients is, is like the next, like obviously you want to get rid of your own stuff first. Like that's, you know, you want to.

Be hands on edits for your own company for market.

Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, because that's, and like, because I've always looked at it like what you taught me is like you're your own best case study. Right. Like what you do for yourself. Right. So in learning how to do the ad or the inverse, not do for yourself, that's how you learn how to not have to do that aspect for the clients as well and be able to create the systems around your business to allow somebody else to step in and do those things. But I think that's a lot of what we see like within the community and stuff is like, you know, like when we do check ins with people and it's like they always come back and they're like, oh, I've been stuck in fulfillment. And it's like, oh, okay. Like, okay, now that's where we're realizing where there's a bottleneck. Like you've had success, you're, you're doing what you're supposed to do, but you're, we're getting to another point where it's like, okay, now we have to figure out that constraint so we can move past it. Right?

But I, but I like editing everything myself.

Yeah, that's, well that's like the biggest, that's the biggest thing is like as a creative, you build. And I've said this in a video like that I put on YouTube for myself. But like you build the, you built the back on your style. Right? Like nobody else can do your style.

Which, but it can be, it can.

Be taught, it can be done. Yeah, it's, you know, we just systematize it.

We say what is, what is your style? Yeah, well, our style is using this font, this editing style.

You have an asset pack that you send to an editor.

We have templates that you use like, like I think you guys, and this is no hate or shade on anybody. I think a lot of people think they're super special and no one can do it like them. But that is the mindset that's keeping you broke and keeping you from growing. Because if you don't focus on revenue generating activities for the business, no one else will because it's not their business. Yeah, let that sink in. Right? So like it's not their business, it's your business. And so like, you can operationalize and train anybody on anything. And that's a belief I firmly have. And the reason I believe that is because, like, if I didn't believe that, I'd be stuck. Right? You can't have that. Like. Like, I love my parents, but my dad is one of those guys Ethan knows who. No one can do it as good as him. And I'm like, hey, that's cool. But the problem is, is, like, that's why he stays stuck sometimes. And, like. Like, I literally just got him to hire somebody to mow his lawn and, like, do his stuff. Like, literally, like, last, last. He's like, in his 50s. He's like, literally, last, last. I think it was last month. I'm like, why are you still doing this? He's like, well, I kind of like it. I'm like. But I kind of don't. And no one can do it as good as me. I'm like, I guarantee you, you can find somebody who does it as good. Right? It's just like, it's the same thing with editing guys. Same thing with shooting. Like, there are people who are as good, if not better than you at the things, and by not hiring them, you just stay stuck.

Right.

So 100. Yep.

Or if you focus in on the wrong things, too. Because I could see people get hung up on their website to their logo or a company, a bunch of stuff.

That'S like mental masturbation. Doesn't really matter, right? It really doesn't. It's just like, it's. And that's what us creatives do a lot of times is we're like. We're like, hey, I. You know, this is cool. I want my logo to look amazing. Like, yeah. And we had. We had someone we were talking with. We were like. We checked in with them, and then like, a month later, we're like, hey, where you at? Like, how can we help? And they're like, oh, I spent the whole month working on my logo. I was like, what are you. Why? Like, your logo doesn't make you more money. Slap a logo up there, fix it later, right? Your website doesn't make you more money. A funnel does, because it actually brings leads and calls. So, like, focus on things that are going to move the needle. It's not like we're Apple or any of these huge Fortune 500 companies yet to where it matters about that. And by the time you get there, you have money to actually fix it.

I say it on almost every call when I have to review somebody's funnel design. They have their logo up there at like 750 pixels wide. And I'm just like, nobody's, Nobody coming here. Brand recognition, put it at 100 and tone it down. Because they don't care. They want it. We want to see the headline. We want to see what it is that, you know, the person's going to benefit from and going through this process. And nobody cares about your logo.

Well, I think the hard thing is.

Like, it's an ego check at the.

End of the day. Yeah. Businesses don't care about your business. Like, they don't care who you are. Everybody only cares about can you get them a result and can you get them a result quickly? Yep. They don't care about anything else. Right. And get stuck up, Stuck on that.

I haven't seen some funnels without logos.

Yeah, Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's, honestly, I mean, it really doesn't matter as long as you are. As long as you, you have a system that's actually working for you.

You know what I mean? Yep.

One sec here, guys. Trying to see if our feed went dead on Instagram. Give me one sec.

What, what questions we get?

We had some, but then I just lost Instagram. Give me one sec. Let me, let me reboot it.

Well, yesterday, Meta had.

There we go. Yes, they did.

It was so bad. Like, I was trying to, like, update my ads and like, my ads are.

Still stuck in this updating period that I'm trying.

Okay. So my, mine were too. You know what I did in the ads manager. Now I don't exactly know what it resets. I was worried it was going to reset.

If you go click reset, there's a.

Reset Ads Manager thing in the top, right. If you click it, it should go away. Mine did.

I'm nervous to do that, though.

I, I, I thought it was going to mess something up. It didn't mess anything up.

It didn't?

No. I thought it was gonna, like, met, like, because I have some rules and stuff in place where it's like, if it hits certain things, like, it turns them off, but like.

Yeah. Did it pause any of your ads?

No, it didn't do, it didn't do anything. It just literally, it just like, refreshed it. That little publishing thing went away and it was fine.

Okay, cool. I guess I'll do that. And nothing, Nothing else changed?

Nothing happened? No. I had stuff running and everything was still running after it refreshed, so.

Okay. And then I was weary about Performance wasn't affected or anything like that?

No, I was like, I I was like. Because I thought the same thing. I was like, man, I really don't want to do this.

Yeah.

But yeah, because I was really wanted to get over that, that publishing hump. So it was just like. Because I couldn't.

Was yours locked? Was that what was happening? It was just locked in publishing. Like it would just.

Yeah, it was trying to publish one asset and I was like. And I, because I couldn't edit what was currently active, if I didn't figure it out, it was just going to run forever. I couldn't do anything. So I just reset the ads manager and it. And it works now. So.

Okay.

That's what I did.

Yeah. Cool. That's good to know. Milan Marketing and Media says any advice on outsourcing video editing? Presently using a company that's overseas, that's great, but pricey. Considering hiring any freelancers overseas instead. Any advice? Thanks in advance. Yeah, absolutely. If you don't mind telling us like what, what are they charging you? And when you say expensive, like expensive is relative to what your margins are. If you want to tell us your margins, you can, we can help a little bit further. If you don't, that's totally fine as well. But as far as outsourcing video editing, it's just like how can I find somebody who is good enough to get the quality that my clients need and get them an amazing result?

Right?

Because like you could invest the most amount of money in an amazing video editor. But there is a point of diminishing returns to where like it doesn't matter anymore. So like you do want to think about. So you're paying 2500 per month for how many videos? Milan Marketing, that's what I was curious about. And then what are you charging your clients and what are those margins look like? Because like if I have a package that's like, you know, 10k a month for a client, but I'm paying 2500 to video editing, that's still a little high. And like as far as margins, you should be sitting at about a 70 to 80% gross profit margin on your packages. So if it's 10k for all of your stuff to hire it out, like including editing, shooting, account managing, software is everything. Like you shouldn't be paying more than 20 to 30%. So like 2 to 3K on that. So you should have about 6, 7K a month. If you have a 10K package of net free cash flow coming in because you're also going to have to spend some money on marketing to get leads coming in that Way. Right. So, yeah, Milan, let me know if that makes sense. What are you, what are your current packages or like, how many clients does that cover for you? The 2500amonth. And what is, like, what percentage of your total P l is the 2500amonth? Let us know. Because, like, if you look at a P L for a whole company, you should not have any more than like 20 to 25% of your total P L. Your total revenue going towards labor and fulfillment.

Right.

So like, if you make a hundred thousand dollars a month, you shouldn't be paying more than 20 to 25k in labor on that hundred thousand dollars a month. And then your marketing spend should be 15 to 20% of that on top of that. So that's another 15 to 20K. So then you're left with. And then you have ancillary costs which might be like 5% or something like that. Right. But then you have ancillary costs and then you should be at like a 40 to 50% margin on the P and L as a whole.

So.

So you just want to bake all that stuff in. But yeah, Milan, marketing, let us know in the chat. You might be typing, but yeah, just let us know those numbers. As far as, like, you know, how much total revenue does that assist with? Because, like, for me, if I, if someone is doing a good job and it's within my KPI for my margins, I'm not going to touch it. Like, I'm just going to leave it. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean?

I've done, I've done both. I've done the whole like, agency editor situation. They're easier to deal with in terms of like dealing with the editor because, like kind of middleman between everybody.

They hurt your margins more because they're.

They do, they, they do. But it's, it's the give and take in some aspects of like, it is some editor. Like, I've had horror stories of some editors, like, just dropping the ball completely. And it's like, yeah, the thing was due today and you're just now responding to the thing and it's like, it's a whole mess. But it's to your point, like, if it's still within KPI of what you, what you can spend.

Yeah. I mean, there's always strategies to be like, hey, I can probably get this down by hiring a freelancer. And like, so you just have to. It's more a pros and cons thing. Because I think a lot of people should maybe start with an agency first as Far as someone to a video editing agency, because you're, you're probably not that experienced in business to the point where you can start like really hiring people and making sure that they're, they're trained properly. But as you scale, you're not going to want to scale with the agency, you're going to want to scale with an internal person. And so like, as you scale with any business, you should always be taking the goal that you should or having the goal that you should be bringing people internally in the company and then growing them within the company. Because like, if you ever want to sell the company. Sorry guys, the camera again. But if you ever want to sell the company, it's not going to be valued as much if it's reliant on like a third party vendor for all of this stuff. Because people are gonna like, investors are gonna look at that as a risk, not something that's good.

One sec.

Okay, cool. Milan. Those are a lot of numbers. Total is about 20 to 25% a month margin, but they're producing between three and five videos a day. That's tough because 20 to 25% margin is like what your total margin for labor should be. So you're definitely up there a little bit more because like, if you ever want to hire a videographer, an account manager, an admin, a VA, like you don't have any more margin within that 20 to 25% to do that because you're spending all of your margin on editing, if that makes sense. So what I would probably do is figure out like, hey, make an sop. And you probably already have this. Make an SOP around the actual edit process. Like what, what do you need? Or what do you want out of them? And then number two, I would start interviewing freelancers on either like online jobs, ph. Or there's different sites that you can use as far as like finding overseas editors, like in either India or some of those places where it's a lot cheaper. Right.

And then if you literally put on Instagram and find them by the.

Or literally put it on Instagram looking for an editor. Yeah, yeah. Like just. Yeah. And then as far as like a total P and L, you should really be shooting for that 20, 25% to get down to like 15 to 10% if you can, if you can cut that in half, it's going to give you more margin to scale because then you can hire other roles that are costing you a ton of money or costing you a ton of time. Because if I had to guess right now, if you're saying that's 20, 25%. It sounds like you might be at 10k a month. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're at 10k a month, your biggest bottleneck is you're still. You're probably still doing a lot of the shooting yourself. Right. So, like, you need that margin to pay a videographer so you can get off of those shoots so you can focus on marketing and sales. Yeah. Evan, Ethan, any thoughts on that while I reset my camera for the millionth time on this live?

No, no, I mean, I think. I think that all makes sense because you don't want to use all of your, I guess, disposable margin on. On one aspect.

Yeah, exactly.

You're getting more cogs in the wheel.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Milan Marketing, for sure. I mean, send us a DM if you have any more questions and we're happy to answer those as well. Or if you have more here, we'll be around for another five, 10 minutes. But yeah, you don't want to spend all your disposable on one area because you need to kind of balance it out.

And.

And that's one of the hard things about business. Right. Is like you have to manage. You have to scale and be good at managing limited resources. Right. Because if you can't do that, then you can't scale. Yep. Charge your clients an average of 3k per month. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, you could probably get that down to. Yeah, the. Like I said, 15. 10 to 15%. Let's see who else we got. We got Mendoza on here. We got Monty, Mike, we got I. Williams, we got Miranda. We have TGD visuals. What's going on, guys? Drop a question down below. What's the biggest thing you're struggling with in your video business? And we'll answer it. Or what questions do you have? We've helped over 500 video business owners one to one. That's not group. That's literally one to one. And we've probably seen it before. And we're happy to give you guys some feedback or any advice that we have. Let's see, what other questions do we have? Guys? Yeah, Evan, I got to reset the ADS manager because I definitely. So there's nothing else that happened?

No, literally nothing happened because I went.

Probably cleared the cache or something, right?

Yeah, well. And I didn't want to do. I didn't want to clear the cache, like for my whole browser because of logging. I didn't want to do it.

Well, I did that and it didn't work, so.

Oh, well, I'm glad. Glad I didn't then. No, because when you go up, there's still the green button for review and edit. Like it's telling you there's something still to review, but you click that and there's nothing it says, yeah, there's nothing to review. So I just hit reset and then there's like a check box for reset, something in review or in public or something like that. Just leave it. Leave it checked on and then just go. And it. And it fixed itself.

And your main issue was that it just was like it said publishing, like 5.

It said 16 of 17. Yeah, publishing 16 of 17. It was stuck on 1. And you looked in the tab, it said 93. And it was like that for it. It was. It's was doing that since like 3 o' clock yesterday, maybe early.

That's helpful because I scheduled a call with Meta and they ghosted me. It didn't show up.

So just. Just reset the ads manager.

This is why we have Evan as our ads guy.

And what's funny is I always have issues on the meta. Like, I look at my metrics on the phone just to like, see where things are at. I never make edits on the phone.

I could, I could only make edits on the phone for me.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like the phone was working fine and usually it gives me a, A, A fit, but fixed itself when I reset it on the. On the browser.

Yeah. That's wild. Well, not to get too technical with everyone, but yeah, if you guys are on here, we'll be on for another minute or so. But what, what questions you have around scaling your video business? What things can we help with and what can we go over? You guys struggling with, getting leads, getting clients, figuring out your niche, figuring out your pricing margins. Maybe you're not as profitable as you want to be. Like, ask us some questions. You want to work with us for video editing? Well, send us a message. And we have a lot of people who reach out to us. But send us a message and I'll have one of my stunt doubles get with you in the next couple days here. What other questions do we have, guys? Let's see. Pull this up. Cool. Well, cool. Guys, if you don't have any other questions, let us know if you need anything else. Otherwise, we're going to dip to our next meetings here. We got plenty of clients that we need to. Need to help all the above. All of the above. Yeah. So for that, that's gonna be a much longer answer, I'd recommend you go to my YouTube. It's gonna be masterfilmaker.com or master filmmaker on YouTube. Eric Darren on YouTube, you can search that. I've like hundreds of videos free on different processes that we have. Particularly that one that's been gaining a lot of traction is the deposit close. Dude, people are loving. Even clients have been like, hey, I just used that and I closed. Yeah, yeah.

The other community I'm in, they're, they're big on the deposit close as well.

So yeah, I love it. It's huge. Cool. Awesome, guys. Well, if you want to learn more about what we do at Master Filmmaker, you can. If you're on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you can go below this video. There should be a link to book a call with our team. We can see if we can actually help. If you're on Instagram, go to the link in my bio and there should be a link to schedule a demo with our team. See if we can help you scale your video business in 2025. With that being said, we'll see you guys next Thursday. Everybody crush it and we will see you there. Peace.

See you guys.

For the very first time, I'm feel like a brand new me. Cloud 9. I just took a.