Ever wonder where all your time goes each week?

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (3s):
G’day, guys! Den here, host of the How to Scale a Video Business Podcast. If you’re listening to the first time welcomed to show, if you’re a long time listener, thanks for coming back. This is a episode number 208. And today we’ll be talking about leadership and team building because it’s a subject that I think every filmmaker needs to polish the skill. So the, the only way to scale your business is to work with contractors or a full-time staff, or there’s just no way you can generate the kind of revenues that will give you the profits.

Den Lennie (47s):
If you try to do everything yourself and we talked about this last week in the systems chat because you haven’t heard that and go back and listen to episode 206 about building proven Video Business systems to have you become a more effective and more efficient in your business. But I’m going to finish off with, this is one of a growth accelerators. This is a growth accelerator like eight, and we’ve been wanting a season of breakdowns of this growth in salaries over the last 10 to 12 weeks. So flick back through the episodes in, you’ll see the other one’s that we’ve been doing. And, but you know it, if I have a, a dollar, every time we had someone say, oh, it just looked down. I want to grow my business, but I just don’t want to have staff.

Den Lennie (1m 28s):
I’d be very, very, very, very wealthy and that he used to be me as well. So, so I want to be very clear about that than I was like, oh, I don’t want to stop because I didn’t actually know how to work with a team. I didn’t know how to lead a didn’t know how to create the right framework to make it successful. And what we talked about last week was the importance of systems. When it comes to working with a Tim, you, you need to have a solid system is clearly defined processes. We talked about how to, to measure that with them, if KPIs and so on, or to share with you, or if there is a it’s like having, having a team, it is a lot is scary as that might seem him.

Den Lennie (2m 15s):
And you don’t have two full-time team in plenty of my VBA members. How are you doing multiple six figures? I mean, high six figures with one, maybe two staff be some part time. So what I want to just be getting Really clear from the outset is that I understand the fear of hiring a team, but as far as I’m concerned, no business has ever scaled without a team. So you just need to decide where you want to sit and like, look, if you want to just be a freelance business owner, do everything yourself. And you’re happy with that. That is okay. Like there’s no, there’s no shame in that.

Den Lennie (2m 55s):
That is completely fine. If that’s what you want to do, then that’s cool. But just understand that there will be periods in your life where you are walking like a Trojan and other times when you’ll be just bawled, Barnard and worn out in which is where you had some support. So if you do on a scale and not be involved in the day to day, then you have to look at bringing in our team. And then I realized that is terrifying for some people, but you know what? You don’t have to hire staff. And this is where the things that things have changed with the, of outsourcing of, and working remotely with, with, with people.

Den Lennie (3m 36s):
In fact, I’m working with someone just now as an outsourced freelance production manager. And we were talking about creating a course with a whole season of documentation and how to videos on every aspect of production management. So if you want it to hire someone, you could get you to do this course. And, and basically Leon is going to share or exactly how she does everything, but LeeAnna actually works as and outsource production manager. But one of her challenges is issues. She is limited by the size for the team, which has currently just to herself because it’s a very hands-on personal business, but you don’t need to hire a full time production manager, or you can have someone who’s on retainer, for example, and the team doesn’t have to be in your office.

Den Lennie (4m 22s):
You know, you don’t need to rent an office if you don’t want to, you remember renting an office for it, you know, its quite a, a thousand dollars a month. That’s $12,000 a year of, of profits. That’s eaten up by you having an office. And, and I know when I was in Sydney, I had a, quite an expensive office is at one point I had a, a studio in an office in, we work in the middle of Sydney, Sydney, and that was like $6,000 a month. Well that’s $70,000 a year in rent that needs to come off profit. So, and I now work from home and don’t need an office and I understand that you do, but but think about it. If you don’t need an office, can you work from, you know, our clients who have been a really cool officer’s in the garden’s, especially now with everything gets going on with the, the Corvette, umm, you know, things are changing all the time.

Den Lennie (5m 12s):
So getting used to working from home, it was not necessarily a bad thing, but you, you can outsource support all sort to, to foreign countries as at a lower cost power hour, leveraging lore, a labor costs, the call that arbitrage like Gary V because the arbitrage where you are taking advantage of a, of a culture or on an area in a world where they might speak English to the degree that you need them to a educated similarly. But the cost of living is a lot lower and therefore the average wage is a lot lower. And I know you used to struggle a bit with this thinking, how can we, are we taking advantage of people? And then something explained to me that no, or because you know, in, in a place like the Philippines, you know that there’s an awful lot of unemployment.

Den Lennie (5m 56s):
And, and if someone get a job with a Western company that will generally stay on for years, if you look after them. And so it’s, it’s really important to provide a solid opportunity for, for individuals who are highly skilled, leverage, lower labor costs in, it would cost you in Australia or the UK or so, or Africa or the, you S but, but everyone wins. ’cause they, the team who are earning fairly and in, in, in, in line with what they would be earning, like buy more than what you learned, if we were walking for a Filipino, a company, but they’d get the perspective of you have the flexibility to work from home, et cetera.

Den Lennie (6m 36s):
So that’s just one option. I know there’s a lot of opportunities to leverage help in Eastern Europe as well. One of our clients under that tree has a post-production company in Guatemala and are members of our VBA good preferential rates to out-source post-production and its a very, very advanced post-production company and they do really, really advances, motion, graphics, design, or implementation. And so it is something that is, is very, very smart. If, if your a systemized, if you know what it is you need to happen. And so the, the, the key to solve that sourcing is having really clear communication and allowing your team to work autonomy, Leslie, but based on the clear indication of what you expect from them.

Den Lennie (7m 24s):
So let me say that again, the key to solid outsourcing and successful outsourcing is having clear communication and allowing your team to work autonomously, but based on clear indications of what is expected from them. So milk on my team. For example, we speak once a week for 2010 to 20 minutes on a Monday, we communicate Every day via slack, But I largely leave her to get on with it. She knows what he needed to do. You use a smart, very smart girl. She does a lot of, a lot of the backend marketing support for us here. And this is Sam is an absolute rock star. You know, I mean just be with me a year in absolute rockstar. And we actually, we talking a few months ago, she approached and said, look, I’d like more responsibility we discussed what she like to do.

Den Lennie (8m 9s):
And what that milk, everything wants to do is manage the team. And, well, that’s great for me because I don’t want to make it a team. So I’m going to promote <inaudible> and, and bring in some support into the company. So she’ll then manage that team. So I’m stepping back from having to be hands on day-to-day, which means that I can focus on M Y because of my clients on a specific challenges of working in a, a and R systemization process, which we mentioned last week, something like that we’re doing, and we are opening up some slots for a day where we’ll actually help you systemize your business. And it’s a very hands-on services. Now it’s not a cheap service, but it in 12 to 16 weeks, we’ll complete your system as your business, top the tool.

Den Lennie (8m 50s):
So combining solid systems and processes with, with the autonomous and, and clear leadership indications that you need from your team, it means you can build a very talented off-shore team that saved you time and money, but without compromising on quality. And that’s the key, I think there’s a lot of misinformation that, umm, you know, somehow or oversee support, isn’t it as good. And, and look, there are some incredible creatives overseas as well. And so if you are, if you’re willing to put the work in to systemize your business, you can then leverage offshore support because we, and what we do it in, for example, in a, in a systemization process, is it we extract or the information from a business owner and being a video, a business owner myself.

Den Lennie (9m 37s):
I know the kinds of things that are going through someone’s head. I know that confusion. I know that the overwhelm, I know that the speed at which business owners think to get stuff done and sometimes bringing in a new member of the team, who’s perhaps not from TV or someone who used to, you know, not, not familiar with your processes, it freaks them out. ’cause they’re just like this or this person’s or a madman. I just don’t know what if they said to you and, and like that, that, that would be the same for me. I mean, I, my wife used to say to me, you, you can’t give me a drive by instructions, but it was so busy or it was so stressed. I was so much going on, but it was just firing off. Instruction’s it, wasn’t a healthy. And so putting, putting the right systems in place ties really, really closely in with a, with hiring a team.

Den Lennie (10m 19s):
And in what you’re doing is we want you to get the right team at the right systems and processes. It can create a framework and, and allow your team to step up to the systems as a, as a roadmap and execute the process is based on the breakdowns. And, and these are just, some of them are many studies. We deploy inside the VBA designed to help you navigate more fluidly through the process. So you can, on-board your team a much more smoothly and in a much more practical way, but, but for all of us to happen, you have to learn to become a leader and you don’t want to have to be the manager of staff.

Den Lennie (11m 2s):
You want to lead your team and being a leader means being vulnerable, being willing to accept that. There’s a word you’ve got to do is be willing to accept that you don’t have all the answers. One of the things that I’m most proud of inside of the VBA, it is we’ve got a very conscious group of business owners and are our key of words to describe or a soft fulfillment and conscious as, and we respect each and everyone of us with respect to our clients. We, we respect that prospects and we, we want to be consciously creating businesses that fulfill us from a revenue perspective, but it also means that we can spend time with people where we care about.

Den Lennie (11m 45s):
And so inside the accelerator method, we were teaching you how to be a better leader as well. And, and you know, you could have a much better experience doing that. Then if you try and figure it out yourself and, and, and figuring out yourself, you’ve got to ask yourself, is that just you being a freelancer going, oh, how do we want to have a call in? We spend some money because I am scared. So, so you were thinking about, you know, what, what is holding you back? Or is it, is it a person looking at the mirror? That’s this holding you back from stepping into that discomfort. And, and the great thing is once, once you lean into it and you feel the support and you get access to the right roadmap, you’ll start to feel like your winning.

Den Lennie (12m 29s):
Again, you start to feel that you can actually get this under control, get this best on the controller, take on more projects, which will help you to unleash your creativity and do more. And, and, and so many of our members are really focused on building a great business, saw that they can have more time off and create revenue streams that can then allow for credit. Tiffany Kris, one of our members just recently took a month out and it made a film and in paid for it, with, with profits, for, in business and all sorts incentives. And that actually, I want to be talking more about finance and accounting over the coming months, where we were partnering up with a UN agency here in Sidney, that I can’t talk to you much about them in that, but there are a specialist accounting firm who, who specializes in the film and TV.

Den Lennie (13m 12s):
And, and while they are we talking specifically about the Australian legislation with the regard, regardless of where you are in the world, you could take the information and ask your accountant, Hey, is a, something like this in the UK or South Africa or Canada or, or, or the U S so I’m going to be helping you focus more regularly on, I want to be doing this is a regular day, once a month, a slot on a accountancy and a number’s and knowing your numbers in knowing what’s available to you. So, you know, it’s really important that you understand that if you want to scale your business, you have to think about expanding the team, even just in, in terms of admins, support, its remarkable, how many jobs that you do that take the time that you think at the time, its only a couple of minutes, but you add it up.

Den Lennie (14m 0s):
A classic one is bookkeeping. Oh I do my and books, but I don’t want to pack a bookkeeper to a hundred quid a month or whatever. It’s like it it’s, it’s kinda of a false economy because we are seeing if you’d rather do something, which is not your core scale, that doesn’t generate you’re money to save some money rather than spending that time, talking to prospects, talking to clients, having a conversation with them and engaging them in a conversation that might lead to some work. And that is where I think I probably won’t just be as bold as to say 85% of even people listening to this show are going that’s me and I shouldn’t be doing it. But I do because you were in that it potentially in that lack mindset and is particularly challenging when this lockdowns and watched it in a bit funny.

Den Lennie (14m 48s):
What with the note to stop starts in the lots of companies being apprehensive about spending money. Then the bottom line is it’s, it’s totally doable. It’s totally doable. And you can still provide a amazing service or even during these crazy times. In fact, it’s probably the time when you should be reaching out to your market and saying, Hey, I actually want to just check in with you, you know how it was all going. But you know that that’s the thing is if you’re a busy day to day, okay, all the admin task in your business because we don’t want a higher someone that’s taken away opportunities and we call it the opportunity costs whenever your doing something that is not revenue generating, there is an opportunity cost. So a before I leave U M one, one thing that you can do is M downloaded an app called M and it’s just the skit in my brain.

Den Lennie (15m 34s):
I should have thought of this earlier, but you know, I suddenly, I often recall these podcasts off the cuff and based on a topic I wanna cover and a a it’s just completely escaped my mind. I’m sorry. It’s just completely blown at, but, and rescue time that said rescue time, rescue time.com, download a rescue time, install it across all your devices. And what it will do is we’ll track what kind of apps you’re using and for how long now what that’s going to do is, is, is going to give you a report on a daily basis on a weekly basis on how you’re spending your time. And it’s the, it’s a really good first step and in coordinating and understanding where you are spending your time and is it on revenue generating activities or is it on stuff that could be done by someone else?

Den Lennie (16m 27s):
And from there you can say, well, now I’m starting to track what I’m doing. A, a, a manual way to do is it’s just to have a spreadsheet with the next 14 days and from like seven in the morning or seven at night track of what you do for every hour and is every Arab in used constructive lead to generate revenue or to deliver client project. And even in delivering client projects, you know, anything’s one in the first things it should be outsourcing and is probably the hardest thing to let it go off. But then if you think about how much time you spend editing is just, is huge. So if you’re able to let go of the editing and let go of the album, you will find yourself with so much opportunity.

Den Lennie (17m 9s):
One of my clients has his core goal each week is just to reach out a 30 clients on a conversation. Last week, he scored a $40,000 deal from doing that 30 clients who you reached out two, three or four or interesting conversations, 26, he couldn’t get through to, or the didn’t have time to talk to him, but one with like, yep, we got a project. So let me ask you this. Are you willing to clear your diary to give yourself the opportunity to spend the day reaching out to 30 opportunities on the basis that one might turn into a $40,000 project? I’d say that’s probably a good use of your time guys. I am that to me this week and I will talk to you again very soon. I have a quick listen to this, ask yourself, this has owning your own Video Business, being everything that you dreamed that would be when he first got started, or it might be hard to admit, but think about whether you are genuinely achieving everything that you set out to.

Den Lennie (18m 1s):
When you made that decision to grab the camera and go it alone, or you really are working less, or are you really earning more? And are you really in control? Chances are you’re bloody good at what you do, but you having to work it like a dog or 70 plus hours a week, whether it’s filming, editing, marketing, or any of the other jobs that come with being the big boss of you’re on video company. When your managing projects constantly searching out for new clients and worrying about cashflow, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture or make real progress. Let’s face it. That’s stress is the last thing you need. When you’re trying to run a profitable company that supports you on the people you care about. The truth is a big time. It provides financial professional and personal freedom.

Den Lennie (18m 43s):
A video is achievable that maybe you’ve got that nagging feeling that you’re overworked, lacking stability. We see and struggling to get to where you really want to be right now. It could be that you just don’t know how to make a positive change on your own. So I created the video business accelerator coaching programs to really supercharge your video business with these Nick coaching programs, you’ll learn all the tools you need to get complete confidence in the success of your video business. You can take the first step on your journey to a successful business that doesn’t control your life. Let me show you how, head over to denlennie.com and click on Accelerator.