Eric Deeran shows freelancers and agency owners how to escape doing everything themselves. Track every 30-minute block of work in a Google Doc, label it revenue-generating or not, then hire an editor to handle the 10-20 hours of editing most agencies waste weekly. Use the freed time for sales calls and strategy instead.
If you feel like you have to do everything in your agency, this video is for you. I've talked to a lot of clients in the same situation where you're kind of in this freelance hamster wheel where you kind of, you can't get out of it and it also caps the growth that you have. And so if you are doing all the editing, doing all the revisions, doing all the shooting, doing all the sales calls, doing all the admin work, doing all of the account management, doing everything, then you have to start with first doing a time audit, is what we recommend to our clients. We say, hey, let's do a time audit. Let's look at what you're spending all of your time on. And typically editing is the first thing we want to get off your plate. And so we look at all those things that you're spending your time on. We say, okay, great, like you're spending, you know, 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week on just editing. And then we hire out the lowest level task. And so typically editing is the lowest level task. It's the task where you can find somebody who is just as good, if not better than you, for a reasonable amount of money. And as long as you're making $10,000 to $15,000 a month in your, your agency, uh, it's very, very easy to find really amazing editors. And so we want to look at that because when we buy that time back, let's say that we do, uh, you know, we're doing 10, 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week of editing. If we even took 10 hours a week of sales calls, then we would able, you know, if we took 10 sales calls at an hour apiece and you closed 2 of them, on a $5K a month retainer, that's $10K a month that you're leaving on the line simply by having somebody else or simply by doing the editing yourself. And so you have to look at it as like anything that is not revenue generating and is not a revenue generating task, we need to get off of your plate so you can focus on the things that actually make money, which is like making ads, taking sales calls, coming up with new marketing angles, coming up with new funnels, coming up with or doing client interviews to use in marketing. So it's like doing case case studies with clients. And so many agency owners are stuck in that loop because they don't buy back the time and then go and do something that's actually productive to the business. It's usually because they really like doing the editing, they like doing the shooting. And as a freelance DP for, um, 5 years, I love that stuff, and I totally understand that people love it. But if you want to grow an actual business, you have to start hiring and taking things off your plate. And usually the first thing is editing. So if you take away anything from this video, I would tell you to do a time audit. So like literally just look at every 30 minutes of your day, open up a Google Doc. We give like a special sheet to our clients. You don't have to have that, but open up a Google Doc and look at every 30 minutes of the day listing what you're doing. And then next to that activity, say, is it revenue generating or is it not revenue generating? And then based on that, you can then make a decision on what you— like, do we need to hire this out? How much money does it cost me to hire this out? And I always tell people because they always are super overwhelmed when they start thinking about hiring, focus on one thing at a time, right? So focus on one thing, delegate it, master it, and then move on to the next. So hopefully that helps, but, um, that's usually why most people are stuck in their agency because they fail to hire anybody to do the work for them. So we'll see in the next one.
