Personal Habits to help you succeed in your video business.

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (3s):
Good day, guys! Den here with another episode of the How to Scale a Video business podcast. Today, I’m going to talk about Personal systems in this episode 182. So my personal system is what I mean. I mean, ways in which you can hack yourself and break out of bad habits that perhaps aren’t serving you to achieve your goals in business and in life. And these are things that I have been in there implementing myself in my own life or the last few years, and I’ve seen a tremendous impact. And I then shared them with my mastermind members and they are seeing a tremendous impact.

Den Lennie (44s):
So I wanted to share them with you today. And because interestingly, I had quite a number of calls recently with perspective members of our clients potentially, and it has been an interesting pattern and a lot of the calls that haven’t gone ahead and I see these patterns in, you know, I mean, I’ve done hundreds of calls. So I, I kind of have seen everything here is to see of how to run the risk to here. And, and I see patterns people’s behavior that stops them from taking decisive action to help them build their business. And, and so we wanted to share a bit today about that and reflect on that and also compare that to my members who are absolutely killing it, who take absolute responsibility for their success and failure have a real connection with extreme ownership.

Den Lennie (1m 34s):
And more importantly, aren’t afraid to acknowledge when they don’t know everything. So one of the patterns I’m seeing with a lot of the calls I’m having is that people come to me and say, Oh, I want some help. And you tell me for 40 odd minutes, what are the problems are and their business. And when I say I can help them and give them a solution, and when money becomes involved, they shit themselves and, and quickly require and come up with lots of excuses as to why they can do it now. And then they do you think, you just want to figure out what to do on their own. And yet what’s happened is over a period of months and years they’ve been stagnant. And this is fairly common in a business is not quite ready for growth.

Den Lennie (2m 16s):
You know, it’s like a kind of constantly seeking a hack or a quick fix to just solve it in individual problem. And in actual fact to grow your business, there’s a lot of different things need to happen, but, but first and foremost, it needs to start with you. And when I compare a call that ends up becoming a customer, and then we do some amazing walk together. And I think about the clients I’ve got in my group, just to know that both groups, the foundation and the mastermind and the, the level of commitment they have to understanding this is a marathon, not a sprint. And that to build a business takes years and lots of experience and knowledge and a, and those that are ready and who are CDOs and committed to the business, take the chance to work with me and my team.

Den Lennie (2m 60s):
And they do it faster. I mean, the average member of my mastermind doubles their prophet in under 12 months, double’s profit, not revenue or profit, so M but I wanted to share some of the things we talk about in that group. This is the kind of, some of the conversations I’m having with people who are, who are kind of dabbling in the idea of getting some coaching. And perhaps don’t make the decision to go ahead and let me be clear. That’s fine. You know, like I’m not for everyone and I don’t want to work with everyone. I’m very fortunate. Our business is going really well. We are profitable. We were growing. So I do actually have to work with everyone that comes through the door. In fact, they get to choose. Yes. And that is the ultimate goal of any business is to choose who you work with and, and be able to say no to people who are not a right fit.

Den Lennie (3m 46s):
And, but today I wanted to talk about some hacks that we’ve been deploying in the mastermind and me personally, that we’ve seen to be incredible for growth personally, and in Business. And the first thing I’m going to start with, and then he touched this last week is thinking time where we are deploying on a daily thinking time strategy, where you sit down for 15 to 25 minutes with the pad and the piece of paper and, and a pen, and you write a port, you pose a question that needs to be solved, and you spend 20, 25 minutes writing dome 15 or 20 different possible solutions. And this has been phenomenal. And this has led on to some deeper questions for my mastermind members about, you know, scaling on some of the challenges to scaling and, and a lot of those businesses are doing extremely well.

Den Lennie (4m 31s):
I mean, they’re there doing tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue and a, and you know, you have, your problem is just change where as your revenue grows. And the biggest challenge you’ve got is, is sustaining it. But I’m number one is, is to spend some time thinking I should be thinking time is really important. And so I wanted to mention that again, because there is it’s a discipline and what, what, what you find is most people won’t be able to do it for any more than a couple of days. We’ve set a challenge for 20 days to do it in 20 days consecutively and, and the group. And the reason this is important is it’s about building a new daily habit, a passional system for execution.

Den Lennie (5m 12s):
One of the things I see, and I’m not going to reveal anyone’s details or talk about anyone’s specifically, but I’ve had, you know, a number of coals this year already. And we, we tend to convert about 60% of the people. We have calls with two, become a client of some kind with us, which is pretty a pretty reasonable conversion ratio. But what’s interesting about those that, that don’t is that they are just actually not ready. They’re not ready for coaching. They’re not coachable because they still think that they can figure it out themselves. Do you think that the solution has just one phone call and, and if they just do this one thing, they’ll get a result. And the truth is that’s not, that’s not what I happen simply. I’m not going to happen because once you solve one problem, you discover another problem.

Den Lennie (5m 54s):
And another problem, and another problem. So one thing that we do inside the VBA is if you take an auth of extreme ownership where we recognize that this is a marathon, not a sprint, we recognize that we have to show up and, and to commit. And one of those commitments is about, you know, doing that daily, daily planning, the daily, daily thinking time. And it comes from a book, the road less stupid, which we’ve talked about before on the shore by Keith J Cunningham. And, But, but here’s the thing, right? You know, you can read dozens and dozens of books. I’ve read probably a hundreds. It doesn’t really matter until you start to execute. You have to actually implement and execute and do it consistently.

Den Lennie (6m 34s):
And, and I see, you know, do it for three months consistently get the same result and then make sure you get it for a fourth month and it’s not a fluke. And so the key here is to make sure you are disciplined enough to actually execute on the theory. So one of the things that Thinking time does is it forces you to solve a single problem every single day. So you can go deep diving in spend, you know, 25 minutes a day for five days, solving five core strategic problems and your business each week, but then you have to execute. And that is where most people fall down because most Video businesses on the whole are trying to do too much of themselves.

Den Lennie (7m 15s):
And they are the bottleneck in the business. And so by forcing you to sit down and think you resolve better, better problems, you’ve come up with better and better answers in better questions, too. The problems that you’re facing in your business. So that’s number one, Thinking team. The second lesson I’m going to share with you is that for many, many years, you know, I just killed myself and my business walking seven days a week or two to seven days a week as a badge of honor, I took, you know, the fact that I could work six in the morning to midnight as a badge of honor, I thought it was all about, you know, the more I put it in the more hustle, the better, and that was just bullshit. Okay. You know, you’re, you’re just going to burn out there. There is for three years when I first started my business, I had the same revenues, about 250,000 pounds a year, or the same revenue, almost within five to 10 grand every single year for three years running.

Den Lennie (8m 2s):
And the reason for that was I was the problem. I didn’t have staff. I did it on myself. I just, I just did everything. I worked harder. I worked every one else. And so I can make more money, but it wasn’t sustainable when I was bar and hope. And nowadays I have a team, I probably work three and a half days a week. And, and, you know, we generate all the revenue. We need all of the prophet we need. I don’t have a lovely car. I live in a lovely house. I have plenty of time to spend during the things I wanted to do. And that is because I’ve discovered that the less you do, the more you make, but the caveat is the less you do have the right things.

Den Lennie (8m 45s):
And there are, there are a lot of things that you can do in your business in life that will keep you busy. That won’t necessarily move the needle. And one of the things that you have to be very, very careful of is a level of self-awareness and the stories that come up in your brain when you justify it to yourself, why you’re doing something one way or the other, a common one I hear is our, you know, I, I, I like doing yet a thing, so I don’t want to give it up, which is, you know, fair enough if you like editing. So to be an editor, if you want to be a business owner, you have to give up the editing. You, you can’t be a business owner and do all the editing. You know, Richard Branson doesn’t fly the planes, check you in here because he’s got nothing to do with the airline.

Den Lennie (9m 25s):
He is scaled up wear, he’s got a team, or, you know, it’s a Steve jobs. Didn’t build the computers I did in the early days. But then he brought, he brought a smart people in them. So from a video Business perspective, the very first time you need to make us as an editor. Cause that is where most of the heavy lifting is going to go. But then what you do with your time is you spend it focused on sales and business development. And the biggest mistake I see small business owners make via, you know, feelings, videographer as you’re trying to be, to be business owners, as they simply don’t focus enough on sales. If I had a dollar for every time, a sell, if someone tells me on a call or I get my w I get my way up through word of mouth, and it was almost like a pro to the fact to get from word of mouth, that that’s fine, but what am I, this is not going to scale your business.

Den Lennie (10m 14s):
What are most would get you to here, but its not going to get you beyond that because it’s too reliant on the phone ringing. You have to go out and be proactive in your marketing, proactive in your outreach and, and be disciplined to do it every single day and track it and have a KPI to know that you’re on target. Now, how do you know, are you reaching out to enough people? I often hear on calls that you know, Oh, well, you know, I, I kind of only really market when I’m quiet and you have to Mark it when you’re busy. That’s, that’s really important because there is a marketing, a lag time of between 90 and a 120 days. But after you’ve put a bid a piece of marketing or before you see any results. So, so it’s really important that if you, if you do want to scale and this is, this is the thing, you know, and not everyone wants us to scale and that is okay.

Den Lennie (11m 1s):
There’s nothing wrong with staying in the freelance lane and being a bit of work, you know, in there. But if you want to build a business that can function without you and generally a consistent and predictable income, then you have to embrace extreme ownership. You have to embrace the fact that you cannot do everything yourself. In fact, I would say that the majority of my mastermind is the ones that are really going through the most growth or the ones who were stepping back from, you know, they have an edited for probably years, ah, or certainly a year. And then, you know, they’re not really shooting as much or they might do the odd shape, but if they are going out and the shoots, they are going out to be the interface between the client and the project and the ones that are seeing the greatest growth are focusing purely on business development.

Den Lennie (11m 45s):
They see their role as the business development lead and in their business, that job is purely to generate inquiries, close deals and fill the pipeline so that the team can stay busy. And that is how you generate predictable income, predictable profit. You know that you’re going to make $15,000 next month that you got to take more than 15 of that. And, and, and there’s also having clear understandings of what your, your net profit should be and, and understanding what, what those numbers actually are in and doing your number’s in the way where you are you when you reflect them every month and you know, what your revenue was, what your gross profit was, what your net profit was and what those percentages are. You know, that this is, this is, this is really important.

Den Lennie (12m 27s):
You know, too many people are like, Oh, you know, and I made that a ground last month. And I’m like, well, how much did you keep? It’s like, well, I don’t know if they say, well, you should know that it is a responsibility. If you are going to run a business, you need to know these things. And so, so that’s the only thing is, is, is a real kind of extreme ownership in terms of the timing. And, and so that, by getting rid of the, the busy tasks, I mean, a lot of the videographers are always very, very busy, but it doesn’t mean they’re being productive or profitable. And so what you want to be doing is focusing on creating space. So you can sit and go through weekly reporting. You know, if you get into a habit of doing daily thinking time, and then once a week, you sit and look at your report and you look at your revenue, you look at your sales page, plane, you look at what is being paid, what is not being paid.

Den Lennie (13m 15s):
And, and you, and you assess on a weekly basis, the position of your business, that way you can make really informed decisions about investment. And if you walk in with a great tax accountant, they will give you visibility ahead of time of what your tax liability is likely to be. So you can put it that money aside and, and you will create a whole new level of freedom and, and a relaxed, quiet confidence and your business because you you’ll know exactly what’s going on. And when you know, the other thing that I’ve been very, very kind of vocal about is his vision boards.

Den Lennie (13m 56s):
And, you know, just about to order a chair that I had in my vision board in 2012, it’s an Eames lounge chair. Now these are about six or 7,000 us dollars. This is not an inexpensive piece of furniture. And it was on my first fish and port. And for many years, I’ve just thought I’ll be getting a replica butt. I put it on my vision board as a bit of a, a kind of, a bit of, a bit of a life goal. And, and certainly a 50th birthday this year. It’s on to say, I’m going to by myself, an Eames chair, no, this chair is about 600, 5,000 us dollars. And its going to become a Thinking chair. And I want it to share that with you not to gloat or brag or show off, but I’m at the same time, you know, I have I have are around it.

Den Lennie (14m 40s):
So its like, you know, at that, that’s the best out of the value of building a business that you can actually afford to do things that you then become a dreams know, become a reality. But what I’m intending to do is, is to purchase that chair and that, that road’s off my initial 2012 vision board. Now you may think of all of 2012 as a long time ago, it was like eight or nine years ago. But the majority of that vision board had have been executed by 2015 and I’ve done subsequent vision boards. And actually I need to do a new one because of the vision board I did in November last year has all come true. And so taking that kind of that system for executing your dreams and using the creative process of vision board is going to super like, it’s just going to be so helpful to you actually achieving them.

Den Lennie (15m 26s):
And I, and I was looking back at this year and I guess, I guess the real lesson here is the, the, the, the deployment of patients setting a clear vision for what I wanted to Business to achieve, where I want it to live, where we want it to live, you know, and in 2009, when I set the company up, it was always about moving to Australia. And in 2021, you know, six years after moving to Australia, we have our beach house where we are building up an incredible 7.1 point for hall in the cinema with a a hundred in screen and, and you know, incredible sewn system. That’s been a dream of mine for a long time.

Den Lennie (16m 7s):
I I’ve got an amazing vehicle. I live by the beach and, and I’ve, and I’ve never walked so little in a sense that my focus is so narrow now on my VBA. Member’s, that’s all I really do at my time is focused on how I can make that program better and savvy my clients and having one, two, one, and helping them achieve their goals because off the back of that, that funds the business and, and obviously doing this podcast and I sat this morning for twenty-five minutes. And my question of the day was how can I create more value in the podcast? How can I expand the teams so that they require that a requirement or of my time is less.

Den Lennie (16m 48s):
And I came up with about 10 or 15 different ideas for ways to improve the reach of the podcast, come up with different guests, segments come up with different ways of, of, of, of sharing knowledge because we were a 180 episodes in and that’s been, you know, no mean feat, but my intention is to go for at least another 180. So I need to scale the team which involves hiring people. And, you know, we don’t generate any income from the podcast. And so its a front end marketing tool. And so we have a think we’ve had just shy of 50,000 downloads now, which is, you know, in itself an amazing achievement. And, But we can’t really track and how that converts to the business.

Den Lennie (17m 30s):
I know that when people who have listened to the podcast and they have a conversation with me that we are at where they are more likely predisposed to be ready to do some coaching because there they have been listening for a while, not always the case, but usually, but it’s, it’s, it’s a marketing channel that we’ve seen consistently come through as a, as a lead nurture channel and a trust-building channel. And you know, as the filmmaking market is extremely skeptical, very, very skeptical. And so sometimes people will listen to the show for a year before reaching up and that’s okay, ’cause, you know, everyone is ready when they’re ready. So, you know, in your market, you know, how, how, how, how deliberate are you being in your outreach, in your, and your marketing?

Den Lennie (18m 14s):
How deliberate are you in talking to your target market and ensuring that you were answering the kind of questions that are appearing in our minds? Well in advance of them giving you any money at that, that is where our time gives you space to do you think about these things? And so, you know, often times people will say to me, well, if I gave up the editing and the shifting, what am I going to do? And answer is think more about how to scale your business because what happens with most Video businesses is that you’re just end up reacting two opportunities all the time. And, and so you’re only ever really responding to requests.

Den Lennie (18m 57s):
And when you, when you get to a point where you no longer have to shoot or at it, you can start to be much more deliberate and measured in your outbound marketing, which means you can attract the right kinds of customers. And in some cases get rid of the customers that are no longer serving you. One of the areas that I find is particularly interesting is that when you start out in a video business, you know, there’s always those one or two clients who say, well, where are you from the very beginning? You weren’t probably charging enough. And now, you know, you’re stuck on those old rates and they probably demand a lot of your time. And sometimes it’s a question of having a conversation saying, look, guys, you know, we haven’t actually put our rates up for a long time.

Den Lennie (19m 40s):
And while we appreciate you walking with you, you know, we can’t sustain this any longer. So, and this is going to be a new rates and, and we just wanna run them by you in and make sure you are okay with that. And if they say what we can afford to pay that, it was like, well, look, we were really grateful to have, we have done this to work with you. And we were not in a position to be able to serve you anymore at this rate. So we wish you the very best and walk away. And because when you do that, you will create space for a client who comes into your vicinity, who will absolutely give you everything you need. And I’ve seen it time and time again, when you’re choosing the wrong opportunities, you’re neglecting the space for the right opportunity to come into your vicinity.

Den Lennie (20m 24s):
And so I want you to think about that as well is, you know, do you have to do an audit of your customers and, and, and who, who is, who is serving your vision and who is not serving your vision because you know, relationships change and its not always appropriate to keep going and with, with products and services and customers that perhaps, you know, don’t serve you anymore. So to wrap this up, I’m going to be a short episode today. And the key is, is conscious awareness of where you want to go or who you want to be, how you want your life to look. And if you are ready to, to do, what’s required to change yourself and to change your habits, to allow you to embrace a new way of operating so that you can have everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

Den Lennie (21m 13s):
Because I can tell you if you set a clear vision for everything you’ve ever wanted. And you’re very honest about where you are on the journey and, and the truth is, and here’s the pitch. If the truth is, if you want to do it faster, you will do it faster and say the VBA guaranteed. We are, we are probably this week, I’m going to launch our new website where we go up. We got like a whole ton of case studies and I’m, if you haven’t had a look at that and I’ll make sure that I mentioned that when we go live, hopefully this week, we’re going to do it. And just, just to add to our planning at a few different things, but as you will do it faster in the right environment. And if you tried to do it on your own, it will take you a lot longer and, and you will have no one to turn to when things go wrong.

Den Lennie (21m 53s):
And that is, that is why I created this environment because when I was running my business, I didn’t have anyone to turn to you. And I spend tens of thousands of dollars going to events around the world to find that support. And so I created my own environment that takes all of that information and push it through the lens of a videography company. And that is why we were so successful at getting consistent results for our clients. The ones that do the work, who show up, get guaranteed results. It’s as simple as that and the folks on I’m going to leave it there for this week. I hope that’s a value to you. I will talk to you again soon. Thank you. In listening to the How to Scale a Video business podcast with your host, Den Lennie, if you are a Video business owner and you hit a ceiling, we’ve benefit from a mentorship support and coaching and check out how you can work with me over at denlennie.com.

Den Lennie (22m 41s):
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, if 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.