Most people rely on word of mouth and take work from anyone who books them. Yet the top 1% of video companies are doing things differently.
Episode Transcription
Den Lennie (3s):
Hi, it’s Den here with this week’s shorty for the how to scale a video business podcast. Hope you’re doing well, just dropping into your feet to give you a little nuggets to kickstart your week. So it’s actually been 26 weeks. It’s COVID really shut down the world half a year. And what an interesting time it’s been, and especially interesting how different people have handled the situation and how they’ve responded to the situation with their businesses. And I’m talking of course, specifically about video businesses.
Den Lennie (46s):
I am, I’ve observed a number of people who’ve kind of thrown their hands up in the air and gone are coronavirus has basically, you know, screwed us. I saw someone yesterday who said they hadn’t had any work since March and what absolutely threw me, but this company was that this company does motion graphics. And I actually thought it was ex unexcusable that they could be affected that way. And I think the owners of that company are fully responsible because I have members of my group and people. I know who, who are not in the motion graphics space. Who’s to end up doing motion graphics projects when coronavirus hit, because they wanted to keep the business going.
Den Lennie (1m 29s):
And there definitely seems to be a, a kind of a twofold split. There are those companies who have just thrown their hands in there and gone, Oh my God, there’s nothing I can do. Not my fault. It’s sort of tough. Hopefully the government or sought me out. And then there’s those who have pivoted and adapted and recognize this is an opportunity to, to grow stronger. And I’m, I’m, you know, I’m very fortunate that the members of my accelerator program are off of that elk. You know, they, they don’t give up easily, but it’s not a culture. We foster, we cost foster a culture of get out there and get on with it. And so it’s just fascinating, you know, how, how different people respond to these situations.
Den Lennie (2m 11s):
And I think what that, what that highlights for you, if you, if you’re a smart business owner, is that if you can survive this and thrive in this time, I’m not just talking about, you know, survive as a, as a first basic principle, but then how can you thrive in this time? You will come out of this source, strong your business will never have experienced such growth in such success. So if that’s you good for you, you know, good for cracking on, cause it, none of this is easy, but you know, what else are you going to do? I mean, I’ve certainly couldn’t just sit back and wait for a handout to kind of faint find another way. In fact, we did, in fact, we’re having Tom on the podcast this week.
Den Lennie (2m 53s):
One of my clients, who’s an aerial filming expert for efficient ardal and a lot of work for BBC. We created a training program together when coronavirus kicked off and we’re like, how can, how can we, you know, join forces make something great. So I’m actually bringing Tom on the podcast on Thursday to talk about that process and a bit more about the drawing course, but more importantly, how, how many his wife mesh just kind of went from like a really, they were doing, they were starting to grow and they had a great couple of months, January, February, then they got kicked to the guts and March, and then, you know, all kind of fell apart. But if the rebuilt it, you know, and that’s, that’s kind of what we teach in the accelerator program, but we just came off a call this morning.
Den Lennie (3m 34s):
And as I like to do, I like to share the insights of that call. And today we did something really, really kind of deep actually and quite high level. And, you know, I said to the guys, look, this was actually a really tough training to put together. And you know, one of the things we were very big on in the group is, is creating a strategic plan for your business. You know, if you want to achieve financial success, you, you can’t just rely on word of mouth. You can’t just rely on stuff, falling into your lap and responding. You’ve got to have a strategic plan with the financial target and a marketing system to execute and be able to measure the response to that, that marketing plan and, and respond and convert visitors into clients and clients into ongoing repeat customers.
Den Lennie (4m 27s):
And we have something called our accelerate a roadmap, and I’ll just run that through with you. So step one of the roadmap is to establish a solid foundation for your business. You know, it’s like, make sure you, you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what it is you want to achieve and what that looks like. And then we audit your business and we can figure out where you are today and where the opportunities are. Step two is to create an unstoppable mindset. You know, you have to accept that when you’re building a business, you’re going to fail often. And what we need to do is learn to fail fast and, and build a callus up so that you can kind of, you know, become stronger through the experience. You know, business education is not free business lessons, aren’t free.
Den Lennie (5m 8s):
And, and the more lessons you learn and the more you realize failure is part of success, the easier it becomes, but also managing your Eagle, managing how you respond to things, managing how you, you deal with these challenges. And step three, today, we talked about, you know, defining exactly who you want to do business with going into real detail. Once you know exactly who you want to do business with, you want to go out and attract your perfect client every time once you attract your perfect client, how do you convert them into steady sales? Another, another big involved process. And then step six is, is create streamlined systems to liberate your time.
Den Lennie (5m 49s):
And once you’re at that stage, it’s about step seven tracking and measuring the right metrics for steady growth. Then you kind of go around them, this kind of perpetual cycle of establishing, are you still doing what you want to be doing? You know, are, are there new customer demographics you want to go after? Is there a different offer you want to do? Can you increase your conversion? Can you increase your, your profit margin and how are you operating your systems? So today was all about creating a customer avatar and understanding where that fits him and, and, and creating smart goals, you know, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time specific goals.
Den Lennie (6m 29s):
And so we took the notion of, we just need more leads and we turned it into a more specific goal of, we have a targeted and well articulated offer that attracts our ideal clients and delivers 10 leads per week consistently. And so when you break that dome, what we have to do is walk out, you know, the specifics, which is a targeted and a well articulated offer, which has measurable attracting your ideal clients. And before we go any further, we need to stop and go well, who is our ideal client and common mistake that I think many, many that busy all business owners and specifically video business owners make cause they try and appeal to everyone and do everything for everyone.
Den Lennie (7m 14s):
And when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up talking to no one. And so creating a detailed client, avatar is actually a very in depth process with the 13 different steps. And what we did today was we went through that in detail and, and created a step by step execution checklist so that you can literally plug and play and follow the steps of what’s required when identifying your ideal customer. And we have something called the ask framework, which is a, which is a series of questions that we get our members to ask their clients. And it extracts an awful lot of this information. And then we look at demographics psychographics, we looked at some examples and understanding the hierarchy of business needs, what people actually want when they are hiring a video production company.
Den Lennie (8m 8s):
And it’s not necessarily what you think it might be understanding human emotion, understanding positive, negative emotion, understanding that different people have different needs. And that fundamentally we as human beings make decisions based on emotion, we validate with logic. And so we went through a variety of different examples. I guess what I wanted to share with you today is that, you know, if you don’t have a clearly defined client avatar and you don’t fully understand what their sort of core problems and needs are and how your solution not only satisfies those needs, but makes them feel like you’re the only people to work with.
Den Lennie (8m 52s):
Well, you are going to struggle. And, you know, unfortunately that’s just what we did. We spent 90 minutes on this this morning as part of our coaching session. But, but the important thing is, is that most clients want to avoid risk. They want to avoid hassle. They want to gain praise and they want to have fun, and then they want to make a profit. So these are the things you have to consider. And also you’ve got to consider who are the other people who are involved in the decision making process and, and this, this process you went through today is all about identifying your one to three core client types and building up an avatar document for each of them.
Den Lennie (9m 36s):
Because if you don’t understand who you want to do business with, you’re never going to be able to work out how to communicate with them. And this is pretty high level stuff. And, and fundamentally, you know, this is what we teach in the video business accelerator. It’s one of my clients this morning said, you know, this is probably the most highly educated video production company group on the planet. And I thought that was an immense immense compliments or so I thanks. Thanks for that, Andrew. It was, it was a great thing to observe and, and it’s true, you know, we, we want to create the highest trained business filmmakers on the planet.
Den Lennie (10m 17s):
So guys, if you’re interested in learning more about that, you know where to find the details over at denlennie.com. And I look forward to bringing to you at Thursday’s episode where we talk with Tom about the three-step drawn foaming system, but until then guys have an awesome day. You’ve been listening to the how to scale a video business podcast with me, your host, Den Lennie, if you’re a video business owner, it’s hits a ceiling we’d benefit from mentorship support and coaching and check out how you can work with me over at denlennie.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the shore over on iTunes. And we’d really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review, and don’t forget to share if you feel you’ve gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers, you know, and please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in see you next week.
