As creative we can be caught up in a perfectionism mindset, and while this is important in editing and post it may not be serving your business more widely. If you are procrastinating on launching marketing, then you’ll love this shorty.
Episode Transcription
Den Lennie (2s):
G’day guy! It’s Tuesday the 21st of July, week 30 of 2020. This is Den Lennie with the How to Scale a Video Business podcast Shorty. Now, before I get into this week’s episode, we are working in a very exciting project. The snow actually that will be revealed at the world, I believe on the 29th of July. So I am taking a couple of weeks off the podcast to focus on that. And then after the 20th of July, I’m hoping that well, I’ll be able to tell you all about it.
Den Lennie (49s):
So yeah, I’d say to take a little break from the podcast for a couple of weeks, just to focus on this project. And also look after my, my accelerator clients, which is my core focus. These days is helping video business owners and particularly freelancers who want to build a business too, you know, move away from that kind of feast and famine that smash and grab of like freelance mentality. I call it the curse of the freelancer and move more into a, a business owner position, which is, you know, where you’ve got a few systems and processes and some, some clarity around who you want to do business with. But before we get to today’s topic, yeah, I I’m working on something just now, which unfortunately I’m not able to talk to you about in detail, but it’s involved me getting back behind the camera.
Den Lennie (1m 41s):
I mean, listening to the shore for a while, you know, I am stopped filming really properly if you use ago. And someone has asked me to do well, why did you do that? Well, the main reason is because back in 2001, I fractured my ankle and that put a peer to my broadcast career. And in 2003, I was on a shoot in South Africa, filming for, it was a pilot actually for a place in this, on the Homer wave. It’s a big UK TV show and I’m angle didn’t feel right. So I went see a specialist when I got back to the UK and he said, what do you do for a living? I said, I’m a cameraman. And he said, not anymore, you’re not. So that kind of put my career what smashed my career to bits really.
Den Lennie (2m 24s):
But I started walking for American television for a while. And then for, for, for up that can became CVP and learned an awful lot about business and kit rental and kit sales during that time, and really learn a lot of my knowledge around how to run a business from, from those guys who run that companies, those companies. And I’m very grateful to them for that. But then at 2009, the DSLR thing kicked off and that kind of with the lighter cameras allowed me to shoot some other stuff. And what was interesting about the hiatus that had had from broadcast was that I got involved in filming at a much higher level. And in this space of a few years was working with Cristiano Ronaldo twice in Madrid.
Den Lennie (3m 9s):
I was working with Robbie Williams. I was working with Duran Duran and those sort of key significant jobs, really kickstarted a lot of opportunity for us in terms of, you know, speaking and, and, and, and creating content for the manufacturers, which leads me to what I’m doing just now. It’s, it’s some, some content from manufacturer it’s a new camera that’s coming out and yeah, it’s, it’s exciting to be involved in something again. So I’ll be teasing you here. I believe the 29th is the announcement date. So I’ll be able to share hopefully more in a podcast episode around that time, but I’m putting that to one side. It has been, I’ve been updating sunrise shots and some beautiful kind of nature shots recently.
Den Lennie (3m 53s):
And it’s been really exciting, kind of just getting behind the camera and my wife and I went apart a mountain on Saturday to shoot a sunrise. And, you know, it’s, it’s really not much can go wrong in your life when you start the day with the sunrise. And I just reminded me about how privileged we are in this industry to do what we do and to be paid for it. And, you know, it’s been a while since I’ve got behind the camera, but I dusted off my eyes and, you know, you don’t forget. So yeah, that’s been quite exciting, but as I say, I’ll share more with you when I’m allowed to, but today I wanted to just touch on the fact that, you know, when you are building your business, Which he never really stopped doing, it’s important that you actually stop and measure and implement, you know, there’s one thing to learn how to do something and to watch a video or watch the training and go, Oh, you know, I know how to do that.
Den Lennie (4m 49s):
I’ve watched the training. It’s another thing entirely to actually implement it and, and, and get the point where you can do it well, and, you know, are measuring the success. Excuse me, just need a quick drink of that. So what I mean by that, I mean, you have to be measuring what you’re doing. I want to on our strategy call today with the accelerator we had at, excuse me, a general Q and a call. And what we were doing was really identifying where the bottlenecks in your business. And sometimes we can get stuck on really small things.
Den Lennie (5m 34s):
We can get stuck by getting in our own way, by feeling that perhaps we have to, you know, get through a lot of coaching or training before we can implement. And so I guess my theme of today’s shorty is to remind you that whatever your plans are strategically to build your business, it’s important that you implement what you’re learning as you go, and don’t wait till everything’s perfect till you launch something. I think this is something that is particularly prevalent with us creators. I think we can often get stuck with a perfectionism and not want to put something out until it’s right.
Den Lennie (6m 16s):
And I guess in the last week I’ve been doing some test filming and the added editing, I can a little animatic, which is kind of a, you know, I can storyboard to the music that I’m using. And I’ve been looking at just replacing the shots as I bring them in. It’s quite quite a luxury to have that really, but I find myself getting caught up and kind of like, Oh, something’s not quite right. And it doesn’t feel quite right. So, so I go and leave it for a night and I come back to it and, and the same is true in business. You’ve got to, you’ve got to implement strategies, even if you’re not quite sure if they’re going to work or not. We were chatting on the call this morning. And one of my clients has been, you know, really investing a lot of money in marketing. And what I admire about this guy is he’s, you know, he’s, he’s not afraid to invest three or $4,000 a month in, in paid advertising, but this particular campaign wasn’t working very well, just knowing he was trying something that wasn’t quite working.
Den Lennie (7m 10s):
But what we identified was there was an added benefit that he was actually adding people to his database who perhaps weren’t ready to buy right now, but would potentially be ready to buy. At some point in the future. Then we started to explore other opportunities you might have to, to kind of promote other people’s courses, our benefits, you know, from, from an affiliate relationship. And so we were just, we were just looking at what are the hidden benefits in, in, in, in doing this. And I was reminded that, you know, when you do any kind of paid advertising, you know, the business education, business lessons aren’t free. So what you’re doing when you run paid ads, and Kim talked about this last week on the podcast, is you are getting your message in front of the test audience very rapidly.
Den Lennie (7m 57s):
And very quickly you will get feedback on how well that ad is performing, how well the message or the offer is resonating with your target market. And so it’s very important that you test, you know, and in marketing, we see marketers don’t think the test. And I think that one of the challenges that many of us, including myself have had in the past is we’re trying to, we try to overthink. We try to figure everything out before we go out and do it because, you know, in some cases on a shoot, that’s what we’re doing. We have to prepare for all the eventualities and the hope that, you know, we don’t, we don’t get stuck or caught out the shit I’m working on this week.
Den Lennie (8m 40s):
We were originally gonna shoot something done in Victoria, but Victoria in Australia is going back down and locked down. And so we had to completely rework the idea, completely rework the, the idea and the, and the strategy and the topic so that we could, you know, sorry, I’m just distracted. That goes, Chris, Schrager’s ringing me. And the phone was buzzing on the desk of Chris. If you’re listening to this, I’ll call you back. But yeah, in a way to completely rethink the concept, the idea and rework the entire thing from scratch. And that’s, you know, that was, that was challenging. But to tie it back to marketing and your business, it’s the same in business things.Den Lennie (9m 23s):
Don’t go according to plan, when you are running a business and the soul put stuff out there, test stuff, but track and measure it. And I think if you do that, you’ll, you’ll start to see lots of little results come into your business. And so one of the things I’m very big on is as I track every week, you know, what my ad spend is, how many leads have come in, how many clicks we’ve had, and then you can start to track it over a period of time. So, you know, think about that, you know, is there something you’re doing in your own business, just know that you’re not implementing, or you’re trying to make perfect before you launch it? Well, you know, if you want a little bit of guidance from me, launch it, test it and then modify it.
Den Lennie (10m 3s):
And then that way you will, you’ll start to see quicker results and, and, and better outcomes. So guys, I will see you in a couple of weeks. I hear you hear from me in a couple of weeks time taking a couple of weeks break, few weeks break from the podcast while I work on some other projects. And we’ll be back hopefully on the 29th of, of July with that, with an episode to talk about the project I’ve been working on. So guys, great to be with you again. And if you’re looking for something to listen to in the next couple of weeks, I think we have 108 episodes in our back catalog. So that should be plenty of things for you to go back and listen to any guys. I will talk to you soon. You’ve been listening to the how to scale a video business podcast with me, your host, Den Lennie.
Den Lennie (10m 48s):
If you’re a video business owner hits a ceiling we’ve 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. 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. So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.
