In this solo instructional video, Eric Deeran walks video‑agency owners through a three‑part blueprint for scaling from $10‑30K/month to $50‑100K/month while maintaining 50%+ profit margins. He first identifies the common operational bottleneck—founders doing all the work—and teaches a 20‑minute time‑audit method to pinpoint non‑revenue activities. Next, he outlines a high‑ticket pricing model that targets 70‑80% gross margins, explaining how to price projects (e.g., $10K revenue with $2K cost) and why low‑priced, one‑off shoots erode scalability. Finally, he addresses the “value gap” by urging agencies to create a unique mechanism and niche‑specific avatar, positioning their offer as a “category of one” to command premium rates. The video concludes with a brief promotion for the Master Filmmakers program, which claims to have helped over 800 agencies.
Chapters
I'm going to walk you through the exact process that you need to take within your agency to profit at least 50% margins and also be able to scale to $50,000 to $100,000 a month. Now, the biggest problem that most agencies have when they're stuck between that $10,000 to $20,000 a month range is they have a lot of projects, they're making decent money, but they just don't have the profit that they want because they're not pricing themselves correctly. And also they feel stuck typically because they can't hire someone to actually go do the work for them. Because they haven't actually priced themselves properly. And if you're between $10,000 to $20,000 to $30,000 a month, typically you are the bottleneck in your business because you are doing all of the work. You're working with all the clients, you're interfacing with every single person. You're doing all of the sales calls, you're doing all of the marketing and everything relies on you as the bottleneck, right? That's why the bottleneck is at the top because everything relies on you as the business owner to actually flow and it flows through you. And that's typically why you can't scale because every time you try to hand something off, either A, you don't have the margin to do it, or B, you just don't have the skills on training someone else to do it for you. And in today's video, we're going to be walking through 3 main things. Number 1 being the operational bottlenecks that you're probably going to have and do have at this stage of business. Number 2, how to actually focus on a high-ticket strategy so you have margin to hire more people because you're charging more per video. And number 3, the value gap where it feels like you don't necessarily have the value you're providing to your clients, how to provide more value. So then you can do number 2, which is price yourself higher. So we're going to be walking through all of that in today's video. So number 1, the main thing being operational bottlenecks is you are typically doing everything yourself. So you want to do a time audit. You want to look at everything that you're doing in your business right now that isn't revenue generating. So I typically just do a time audit. I basically go through every 20 minutes of every day. I set a timer, like I use one of these timers right here. It's like one you can get on Amazon. And I set a timer for 20 minutes. I set that. I look at what I do when it goes off and I write down in a Google sheet, like what I did, what the time was and what I actually was doing throughout the day. I do that for an entire day. And then that typically tells me what are the actual things that I'm spending my time on. And what you'll typically notice is you're either doing a lot of editing, doing a lot of client-facing things, checking your email, checking Slack notifications, and it, it's not the most productive use of your time that's actually gonna help you grow the business, right? Because the main things that are gonna help you grow the business at this stage is taking sales calls, scripting and running ads, uh, creating new ad campaigns and marketing campaigns for yourself so you can get more leads and calls. Like those are the main things that are going to help you grow. And if you're editing or shooting or on set, like that just takes your time away from actually getting more leads and growing the business because those are fundamentally the two things that are actually gonna help you grow, right? And having an ad system and like an inbound system like we teach in the program is definitely one of the things that can help you there. Um, but you need to look at your time and see, hey, what am I actually spending my time on? Uh, so I know where to allocate my time properly because you only have maybe 12 to 16 hours a day to work. And if you're using, you know, 10 of those to edit, then that severely takes your time away. And also it's hard context switching because if you're like going from editing, then having to go to sales calls and then going into like running ads, like they're just different mental things and it's hard to kind of switch like that. And then number 2 is like focusing on an actual high-ticket strategy. So what I mean by that is like, make sure you're pricing your projects properly. And so we're looking for typically a 70 to 80% gross profit margin on those packages. So like even numbers, let's say you charge $10K for a project. From there, you should only be spending typically $2K, which is 20% cost towards contractors, towards fulfillment, towards whatever it takes to fulfill on that $10K contract that you just sold. And what I typically see is a lot of agency owners will price themselves because they are doing everything themselves. They don't price themselves to have other people do it, which typically has to be a higher dollar amount versus just what they do. So like they, they price out of their own wallet because they're like, ooh, this is like a lot of money for me. So I'm not going to spend, I'm not going to price it higher because I think it's a lot of money. And you know, I don't want to have to price it any higher because I feel like I couldn't afford that when that's not the case. Your clients don't think that way. And when you're pricing yourself too low, you can't hire the proper people to actually go and grow the business and do this stuff so you can get out of the day-to-day stuff, right? So number one is really make sure that you have 70 to 80% profit margins because that's gonna help you actually hire people and have enough money left over to then reinvest that money back into ads to get more clients, right? We really wanna try to avoid the, the small one-off $2,000 to $3,000 video shoots that aren't really making us enough money and growing our business and they're kind of a distraction. You know, and I get like you have to make money sometimes, but you want to try to get away from those types of projects and price yourself into the place where you have enough margin, enough money, and you can hire people to do the projects for you. And then number 3 is addressing the value gap, right? So a lot of people struggle with like, how do I price myself differently? And how do I price myself out of just like the competition of like always being the cheapest option? And the way you do that is having a unique mechanism. So like, What is, what is unique about your offer and your video content system that helps your type of avatar get a result, typically a monetary result? Number 2 is like niching down into a specific avatar. And that's why people say to do that, because you have to have specificity. If I say, hey, I have this special video content system for medical practices that helps them get more patients, well, I'm going to stand out across other video agencies who just say we create videos for businesses, right? Um, and I can demand a higher price because I'm more more specific with what it is that I'm doing for a specific type of person, which makes them feel like I have more of an expertise, which you should in that specific avatar, right? So that's how you get out of that like commodity-based pricing. The best example I use of this is like, let's say you're shopping for bananas, right? Um, 2 bananas are— they look exactly the same. One is $10, one is $2. You're probably just gonna buy the $2 banana, right? Versus if you have a banana and then the special fruit that has all these health benefits and the special fruit's like $30, Well, you can't compare it to anything because it's in its own kind of category and it's different than all the other fruit and it has all these other benefits that come with it. So like, you don't really know, like, is $30 a lot of money? Is it not a lot of money? You have nothing to compare it to. That's what we want to do with our video packages. So we feel like your client feels like, hey, I have nothing to compare it to because it's so unique and so different than what everyone else is offering. And so that's what we say when we're like saying category of one or when you've heard category of one, right? And those are the main 3 things. Like, if you can fix the operational bottlenecks, right, and hire other people to do the work for you, you can focus on scaling an actual higher-ticket offer that has higher margins, and you can actually fix the value gap, right, and have some specificity within your offer, then you can scale to $50K to $100K a month. It's just how many deals do we need to get there? But typically, a lot of founders struggle with these 3 aspects, and this is what typically holds them back because they don't have these things in place. Now, shameless plug, if you want to learn more about how we can actually help you do this, uh, Master Filmmakers worked with over 800 video and creative agency clients up to this point. There's a lot of things that I hold back on YouTube that I don't show you guys because we work with clients directly on that. So if you wanted to learn more about how to do that, how to work with us, or just get more info, there's a link down below in the description and you can check that out, apply to book a call with us, see if it's a fit. So with that being said, hopefully this is helpful for you guys and, uh, we will see you in the next video. See ya.
