Why Your Video Agency Isn’t Growing (Even Though You’re Crushing It)

If you're a successful video agency owner and you still feel stuck, it's usually because of these three main mistakes that you're making. That's not letting you scale from 10, 20, 30, 40k a month to multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a month every single month. And typically it's people who started as a dp, an editor, they started a video production company, they got successful, but what got them here is not what's going to get them there. And I see this time and time again because we've worked with over 500 video business owners in the space to help them actually grow and structure their business. And in today's video, I'm going to be breaking down the top three mistakes that video agency owners are making. That's not letting them scale and ultimately not allowing them to run their business like a business. And it becomes more of a glorified job that they end up hating and giving up on at the end. So mistake number one is relying on word of mouth and referrals as the main way of getting your clients. You see a lot of these successful video agency owners, and maybe you yourself watching this, started because you did a good job, you did good work, right? Somebody referred you to somebody else and then you kept getting work from there. And yes, that brings in good work, and yes, that brings in good money. But ultimately that's not the thing that's going to allow you to actually scale to the next level and make more money. For instance, what got you here is not what's going to get you there. So what you need to start doing and start thinking about is how do I put a scalable client acquisition system in place in my video business so I can actually grow my business and not have to be reliant on word of mouth referrals. Word of mouth and referrals should be the cherry on top, the icing on top. It should be extra revenue that goes directly into profit and directly into your pockets, right? Whereas with having a consistent system, that's where you can start to build a team. Because, you know, hey, I'm getting, you know, 20 leads this month, and of those 20 leads, 10 of them are going to turn into calls. Of those 10 calls, five of them are going to turn into clients. And each client to me is worth $40,000 over the next year. And that's how you do the math to actually scale. And you can run projections on what you're going to hit next month, next quarter, next year. Whereas a lot of video agency owners, even though they're Successful are kind of shooting from the hip and they're not really in a place where they can predictably and reliably grow the business if they had to. Like and a good thought exercise to think through here is if I had a gun to your head and said you need to grow your business by 50 to 100% in the next two to three months. And if you didn't know what to do, that usually means that you don't have a reliable system in place to get clients and you don't have any systems really in general to get clients. And that's where a lot of people struggle and a lot of people kind of fall flat because they don't know how they're growing. So they're just repeating the same year over and over and over again, hoping that something's going to be different. But that ultimately just leads to this hope and pray marketing and hope and pray growth strategy for the video agency. And if you want to know how to actually set up these systems, there are other videos on the YouTube channel going over exactly the nitty gritty, the numbers of how to set up a lead generation system so you can get more clients. But I'm not going to go over that in this video. Mistake number two is getting stuck in the high ticket one off projects as opposed to also building a recurring revenue base in your video agency. And a lot of these larger production companies, which you might be one of them watching this video, are stuck in the place where they are doing 50k, 100k jobs. And that's amazing. But the problem with that is the profit margins on Those are typically 10 to 30%, which doesn't leave a lot of money left over at the end of the day for the business because revenue is cool and the size of the projects are cool. But really what's really cool is putting more profit in your pockets and taking home more money for you as the business owner. And so while those projects are great, the problem is, is you look at your revenue over the year and you have like a blip, a blip, a blip, a blip. And you have all these little blips. But then you have these really low valley valley months where there's literally nothing happening in those months. And so you're feast or famine, right? So one month you're feasting, you did 100k job. It's amazing. The next month you're maybe at, you know, 5 to 10k and it's this up and down, up and down, up and down. And you can't Depends on what you want to do. If you want to sell the business, that's not a sellable business because it's not going to get a very high valuation because there's no consistency to it. Right. If you think of your business as an asset, nobody's going to buy an asset where they don't know where the next client is coming from or they don't know how the business reliably attracts clients. And so if you don't have a system in place to get those people coming in over, over and over and over again, then A, that's going to be a problem. And then B, if you don't have recurring revenue or MRR where people are paying you, you know, 5k this month, 5k the next month, and you can predictably look at what your monthly revenue is going to be next month, the month after and the month after that, then it's just really difficult to have any sort of stability in the business. And it puts you in this feast or famine mode. And it's also just really imp sell that type of business because nobody wants to buy something that's inconsistent. So really what you need to be focusing on is you don't have to stop doing those larger one off jobs, but you do want to look at how can I start to build recurring revenue with existing or a new sector of clients. And so we have a lot of clients working with us that are doing a million to 2 million a year. They're very established video production agencies and they've worked with like Microsoft and Amazon and all these huge companies and they come to us because they look at their P L and A they're not as profitable as they want to be and B they don't have as much consistency as they want. So what we do is we open up a new sector of their business to target small to medium sized businesses. And these types of people will pay you 5 to 10k a month to work with you to just get some very simple content done for them. And so you think about this as if I'm. If I have, just for the sake of easy numbers, if I have 10 people paying me 10k a month on this retainer package and I have them paying me 10k a month for 6 months straight, then I have 100k a month guaranteed every month for 6 months straight, right? And typically the thing with these types of packages is these are not the large productions, right? They're not the things you're used to when it comes to the 50 to 100k production budgets. These are typically one to two people going out on a shoot and just shooting some content very simply like testimonials, brand films, short form content, social content, very simple stuff that that business can then use to market their business and get more customers. And they're paying you 5 to 10k a month every single month for this content for which gives you the consistency and gives you the peace of mind. So now you say, hey, I have 100k coming in for my video agency for the next 6 months every month. And now I can sleep at night and if I do another a hundred k project, then I hit 200 that month. But my baseline never drops below 100k a month or my baseline never drops below 50k a month or whatever it may be. Right. So we're starting to establish some consistency there to where we're like, okay, we can breathe a little bit. And now I have that consistency. And you're never too big to start implementing that. And sometimes I hear from people that, oh, I don't want to do these, you know, 5 to 10k a month retainers. Well, you're sending one videographer on that job and typically there's 70 to 80% profit margins. So why would you not have more profit in the business and why would you not open up a new sector that's very easy to implement and very easy content to shoot so then you can have more profit in the business and sleep well at night. Right. It pays for all of your expenses. And so I think a lot of more successful video agency owners maybe don't really understand that because they're just thinking in terms of like, I want to do these big things for Amazon and Microsoft and we have clients like that. But like, you know, at the end of the day, if you're doing, we have one client that was doing $2 million a year at 10% profit margins, that means they're taking home $200,000 a year on $2 million. And for me, that's just not a very like appealing business to run. And it wasn't for them either. And now we've started to build up their recurring revenue. And the final mistake number three is not knowing how to buy back your time. And so I see a lot of video agency owners who are doing everything still and they're focusing on things that don't actually make them more money either. They're doing 2,300k a year and they're still editing, they're still going on shoots, they're still replying to client emails, they don't Have a va. They don't have an assistant, they don't have an executive assistant, they don't have anybody to help them. They have a couple of freelancers that work with them, but nothing is solidified. And that kind of comes back to they're too nervous to hire because they don't have recurring revenue in the business. Right. And they don't have any consistency. There's. But it also comes back to, it becomes this cyclical loop where you're working in the business, not on the business. You're, you're spending too much time working on the projects and working on, working with the clients and not enough time developing new business, developing new offers, developing new retainer based offers and having something in place to start growing the business. You're too busy hustling and doing all the things inside of the business. And this is a big mistake that we see and this is why a lot of people end up struggling. So what you need to look at is do a time audit and figure out what are all the things I'm doing and which ones are actually making the business money and which ones aren't. And then we categorize those things into different sectors and we say, okay, this is an admin that we can hire. They're going to cost us X amount per month. Great. And now we have this type of person who would be an editor, right. They bring them onto the team and typically you guys already have editors because you're at a successful level, but you don't have people to manage your inbox. You don't have people to take care of clients and manage client requests. Or if you do, you're maybe micromanaging that team a little bit too much because you have to be focusing on working on getting more leads, getting more calls on the calendar and enabling your team to be the best they can be. And one of my mentors taught me this. But it's transformational leadership versus transactional leadership. And when I first started I was like micromanaging everybody. I was telling them what to do. And that's more transactional leadership. When it comes to transformational leadership, you, you assign each player on your team a KPI that they're tracked on. So if it's sales, it's amount of new units or clients enrolled, right? If it's editing, it's amount of videos that they've edited this month, if it's an admin, it's how quick is our response time. And then you just measure them on that goal and you let them take complete control and complete ownership over the outcome. And you have to start doing that. So you develop these mini leaders on your team so you can actually rise above and not be in the minutia and of the day to day, which kind of keeps you bogged down and keeps your brain fogged up. And I've been there where I'm like managing the team and looking all these things and editing and going on a shoot and my mental bandwidth, I literally don't have anything else to give, so I don't have any time to focus on growing the business. So you want to get yourself out of that. Start hiring people to put yourself in place. And I want to leave you with one final thought. The biggest agencies aren't the most creative ones. They are the ones that have figured out how to get predictable revenue at scale and build the best business. And if you want our help building a predictable system, just click the link below, schedule a call with our team, and we're happy to see if we can actually help you do that.