How to Scale Your Business in the Next 90 Days.

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (1s):
G’day guys! How are you? It’s Den Lennie here host of the How to Scale a Video Business Podcast here with your shorty. Now this week, it’s sponsored. Yeah, by ClearBoard by Chuffed Productions. ClearBoard is a really fantastic way of presenting content, too. Your audience, if you, our have clients who are used to living, delivering keynotes are power points and they want a more interesting way of doing it. Now, if you want to learn more about clearboard, you can actually go out to chuffedproductions.com.

Den Lennie (45s):
And then I’ll also link to the site when he banned is one of my client’s and they’ve really been putting a lot of work in recently to building a new studio, their base than the UK, and its a pretty innovative system, a very simple system, but it’s the system that allows clients to communicate and a more unusual way. And so if you’re interested in learning more, a bit clearer aboard is really cool and reach out to Ben on LinkedIn below. Let me help you be happy to have a chat with you on LinkedIn and explain more about the, to you. But it’s a kinda thing that it, it, it worked really well for explaining really complex data. And so yeah, I got a shout out to Ben had promised him, I said, I had mentioned that on the podcast.

Den Lennie (1m 28s):
So this week we are into a new planning quarter inside pitch for a new business accelerator. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that strategic, planning’s a big thing that I am very committed to within our community. And from a coaching perspective, it’s, it’s critical that you have a very clear plan of what you’re doing, who you are doing it for, how much you want to generate past late in the business, both from a revenue perspective on a profit perspective. And then you want to reverse engineer there and create a strategic plan that will help you achieve it in a meaningful timeframe.

Den Lennie (2m 12s):
Sounds pretty simple. It is. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. And as with, as with most things in business, my teeth backend and you know, that the real true success of of most business is just doing fairly mundane, repetitive tasks over and over again, consistently. And as, as creatives, as filmmakers, sometimes we struggle with that consistency. And so, you know, it’s very important that to we create frameworks around, what it is we’re doing to ensure that we’re spending our time on the right things.

Den Lennie (2m 55s):
So today we did a planning session where we, we reboot a planning every 30 days every quarter, or we go a bit deeper. And so I want, you know, if you don’t do any kind of planning, I want you to kind of use this opportunity to, to kind of plan out your next 90 days. Ah, have a think about, you know, what is it you want to achieve in the business? It might be a revenue goal. It might be, but we’re like we are, we’re building a new website. So the next 90 days we will be we’re in full website Maude. And so our outcome is to build a high converting website that really reflects our experience. And more importantly, the, the outcomes that we help our clients achieve through the video business accelerator program.

Den Lennie (3m 36s):
And I don’t feel our website does that in a minute because its just never been a priority for us. So we are walking with the web company, we were working with copyrighters and putting in an awful lot of work into getting that up and running. So that’s our strategic objective and the outcome of which we’ll hopefully have us built more authority and the marketplace, if someone has never heard of us before then they go to a website that we’ve got a good idea of who we are, what we do in how we help people. And if that’s something that will benefit you, the listener, and if your listening to this on your, on a video production company, then there’s the possibility that it we’ll. So Anyway back to some kinds of practical training for you. So the best way to figure it out, your strategic planing is to actually walk out, you know what it is you do and who do you do it for her?

Den Lennie (4m 20s):
I’m not talking about kinda of, you know, well we make videos for X, Y, and Z. Yeah. What is your true purpose? What is the, why do you exist as a business? What difference? Do you want to make to your market? What impact do you want to have on your customers? The next part is to get very clear on, you know, what does that look like on a commercial sentence? You know, it’s over, we are saying, I love to film documentaries, but if they’re not commercially viable, then how can you turn what you love you have? Or what, what do you, what, what stimulates you? What keeps you excited into something that generates income? Because one of the, one of the challenges that face a lot of filmmakers is they spend way too much time trying to make every project like a passion project.

Den Lennie (5m 6s):
Every project that you do has got to be amazing and somebody to put it in the short deal. And I think it’s a big mistake. And at the end of the day, if you’re a professional video production company, your job is to make videos for our clients. They don’t necessarily have to be videos that you want to watch, but they have to be videos that their audience want to watch. And that is why as a professional, your job, your role is to, and is to be entirely, you know, in, in it take a tick or a concept or a, a, an obscure concept in and turn it into a story that is relatable to the audience who you are, you’re making it for us. And so, you know, without a plan that that becomes very difficult.

Den Lennie (5m 47s):
So you wanna, if you want to figure out, you know, what is your mission? What is the strategic, yeah. You could objective in terms of revenue goals, financial goals, where do you want your clients to be? How money do you want to make? How many jobs do you want to work on? Because just having a financial goal is as obscure. If that’s just you want to make a million bucks. It’s like, well, why do you want to make a million bucks? Why do you need a million bucks? I remember why being in a business community, it with someone who ran a restaurant and he see very proudly talk, whether they are generated a million dollars a year. And then the next sentence you said, but we don’t keep any of it. Like why an athletic, you want to have 30 staff and Bell’s and stress this year, you’ve got a million dollars restaurant.

Den Lennie (6m 28s):
If your not making any money, I’d much rather have $100,000 a business walking in one day a week I’m and keep a hundred dollars thousand dollars. So, you know, profit and revenue are two different things and be clear that with the number that’s important as the profit, how much did you keep? And also how much are you willing to do for that money? How much of your time are you willing to sell to achieve that goal? And, you know, I think when we start off in business, we all get a bit excited about the idea of making a million or half a million or whatever the number it might be. But really the only money that counts is the stuff that you have to keep it after you pay your taxes. And then that’s the stuff you can enjoy.

Den Lennie (7m 8s):
So getting clear about what you want and how are you going to do that and, and how much time you want to have for me personally, moving to Australia, moving up here to the sunshine coast, it’s all about lifestyle. It’s all about building a business around the life they want to live and nothing else. There were a building, a beach host just know, and will be turned. And 50 meters from the Beech. The goal was to walk in the beach everyday and work with amazing clients in and coach people through, out through our programs and help people achieve great success, whatever they defined that to be, whether it be deemed that to be. So you need to get very clear on that. And once you’re clear on that, then you reverse engineer the steps it’s going to take over the next five to 10 years to achieve that.

Den Lennie (7m 52s):
But we always overestimate what we can achieve and a month or a year, but underestimate what you can achieve in six months, 12 months, 18 months. You know, I’m talking about in terms of let you know, if you were talking about the next 30 days, we might be over ambitious, but we think we can achieve, but over six months we give the chief of law. But more than that is, think about life in terms of the next five to seven years. You can start to really see enormous growth. And so this strategic plan element is as where we break down and what are the different buckets or the different areas we need to put our attention and the obvious ones, our sales marketing, you know, production and client retention, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Den Lennie (8m 35s):
You know, that there are literally 50 or 60 different strategic objectives. You need to execute to get your business calls, to save a million bucks and saw what we do within there. The program is we create structure around that. We create a very clear structure that the guy is checking out every Monday with their objectives for the weak. And it gives them a bit of social accountability. And, but also more than that, it’s building habits within themselves. So that the start to get used to always thinking in terms of strategic planning and the advantage of strategic planning is that when you get distracted on a shoot or a client calls and you go write, where was I at?

Den Lennie (9m 17s):
Instead of spending 20 minutes, trying to get back to focus, you simply got to your list and go, Oh right. I was working on this website. Let’s do that thing. No, and it’s very powerful process. Or if its something that you liked to learn more about than please reach out and can, I can set up a 50 minute call with, you can talk a bit more about how it may work for you, but that’s me at a time for this week folks. I’ve got good Matt at my end, Darren Marston on the podcast on Thursday, Darren runs online, creative in Brighton, in the UK as a colorist and postproduction facility. And he’s gonna share his business journey and how he’s still thriving and investing during lockdown and COVID and actually building up really solid business.

Den Lennie (9m 60s):
And some of the lessons he’s done in the last day of 21 years. So looking forward to that and I’ll see you then. 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, you to hit a ceiling and we have benefited from mentorship and support and coaching and checkout how you can work with me over at denlennie.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes. And we 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.