Planning a Long-Term Business Strategy.

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (3s):
Hey guys, Den here for this week’s episode of the How to Scale a Video Business podcast, and today we’re gonna be flipping back into breaking down or more of the eight growth accelerators. And today is going to be talking about the importance of planning for a longterm business strategy. This is actually a growth accelerator for three. And if you’re a new to this show and you haven’t had the other episodes regarding this many series that we’re doing the 8 growth accelerators are eight key areas that we’ve identified working with video businesses for the last four years.

Den Lennie (43s):
That are critical in terms of putting in place the right structure. So you can scale consistently and, and scaling consistently means, you know, in practical terms often doubling profit in 12 months or less. And, you know, there’s no one thing that, that, that creates that solution. Umm, you know, you could generate more inquiries and get more business in, but that’s gonna create some problems with capacity and, and if it just you and your on or with one other person, that capacity is going to fill up quite quickly. And so what we wanted to talk to about you about it today, was planning for a long term business strategy.

Den Lennie (1m 28s):
You know, I, I see a lot of them increasing t of a offers in the marketplace for courses that we’ll promise to make 20 to 30 grand, then you know, a three weeks. And then the truth is that that can sometimes happen, but it’s not necessarily sustainable. And some of these offers are really compelling and they’re really exciting. And they seem to like, you know, be very interesting for a lot people to go. I know that that would be to be great. And then of course we’re always, you know, intrigued by something that’s seamless to be a great outcome, but oftentimes, you know, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. And what I’ve noticed or being in business for 12 years at being in the industry for 26 and, and working with businesses day-in day-out or week-in week-out or is that no one scales quickly and sustains it.

Den Lennie (2m 24s):
So what we want to be doing is, is taking some of the notions of it before you go in a video shoot, you have a plan, right? You do pre-production. If you’ve done your pre production property, the shoot was smoothly. So you’ve got call sheets and shooting scripts and, and, and, and storyboards. So you know exactly what’s going to happen. So that when you’re on set, you’re maximizing the amount of time you have available. We were talking on it on a, on a, a coaching call you on the day about you. No unit moves when you are doing bigger productions, try to avoid the unit moves ’cause it takes so much time to move people in some cases from one area to another.

Den Lennie (3m 5s):
But I want to ask a question. Why, why do you think so many video business entrepreneurs fail to prepare in the business for how they are going to scale? How are they going to grow the business in the most effective ways? And so today I want to talk about the strategic planning for your year and assessing where you are in the business growth journey currently and where you’d like to be in, let’s say 12 months from now, and this is a sensational. It’s not going to be like, Hey, just do this one thing. You’ll make 20 grand. It’s a much more considered approach, a much more measured approach.

Den Lennie (3m 49s):
And so what I want you to think about is, you know, what, what is the outcome that you want to achieve? Because you, no, you need to understand where you’re at on the business growth journey and, and, and understand where your out in that road map. Once you want that out, then you can work on creating a strategic plan. So we always start with you. No. Where do you want to get to? And you know, it, it, it’s always about focusing on what is the outcome you’re looking for here? What is success look like it to you? Is it is a house or is that a car or is it a certain location that you want to live in? Is it a certain type of work you want to be doing?

Den Lennie (4m 30s):
Is it a man at a time you want to be spending doing other things. So, you know, getting very clear on what success looks like to you is really, really important because then you can start to establish, but what is, what do we need to do to facilitate that? And that’s where the strategic plan comes in. Once you clear on your focus on the revenue you want to generate, then you can start to build the mechanism in, in many ways, reverse engineer, that process, you know, when JFK announced they were going to put a man on the moon in 1960, they had the plan was to put a man on them when and returned in the safely to earth within the decade. I think the, the, the end was it 1969.

Den Lennie (5m 11s):
So the, but a year or early this strategic plan is like the objective is to put a mat on the moon and return him safely to earth or a woman. And I’m, and the, the, the goal was there to work at all. How do we do that? They needed a strategic plan with a timeframe and you no, nothing that’s worthwhile happens quickly. You know, th th that you want to build something sustainable. That’s live this life long lasting, you got a set up properly, and that is where the strategic plan comes into place. So, so let’s see, you’ve got your goal of say, you want to, and let’s call it to a hundred thousand dollars a and the next 12 months, prophet or our revenue, depending on where your out in the journey, it doesn’t really matter.

Den Lennie (5m 54s):
Well, let see, you want it to make $200,000 in profit. Let’s call it a hundred thousand pounds, $200,000, just run random fingers. That’s the goal. So how are you in to execute that plan? How are you actually going to do that? And so what you need to do to break your year down into quarters, and then to months, and then to weeks and two days. And if the goal is to achieve, you know, 200,000 profit profit in 12 months time, how much do you have to sell to generate that? Well, if, if you are one operating at 50% gross profit, then let’s for argument’s sake, 30% gross profit, and how to make 200,000 gross profits, you have to generate for a hundred thousand.

Den Lennie (6m 39s):
So at that, no becomes a different number. So how do you divide that for a hundred thousand by 12 to January a figure each month? That’s the basic premise. That is how much you need to sell to achieve the outcome, but then you start breaking down. Well, how do we get in front of the right numbers of people to be able to do that? ’cause that is something that’s a whole different kettle of fish. So if you want to generate some of what this out here, cause of my brain is not working. You got to generate $33,000 a month to generate $400,000 a year or so.

Den Lennie (7m 27s):
So how do you sell $33,000 a month worth of product in on assuming you’re making 50% profit while they, it, you need the strategic plan. And you know, you overall that come is okay. I want to add $400,000 in revenue. And I want to, and a thousand of that to be in profit, that is, that is it. That’s the absolute clarity of that is what separates the winners from the dabblers. Then what you have to do is break down all of the tasks and strategic outcomes that need to be achieved in the next 12 months to make that reality. So it can be, well, we need to create a marketing strategy that attracts clients with budgets of between, you know, 10 and $15,000.

Den Lennie (8m 9s):
And we need to be, be going after, you know, four or five or six of them in a month. And selling, if you have to sell a, a close rate of 50%, you want to be talking to six clients a month with the budget of 10,000. So your potential outcome is $60,000 in sales. But if you only, because half of them, you get $30,000 in sales and you get close to that 30,000 a month or required four, that a financial outcome. So then you have to start breaking down. Well, you know, we need to create a marketing strategy for that. How does that look? And we’ll be talking about that in a, in a future episode, but just take it from a strategic plan, point of view, you need a marketing strategy, you need a sales process, you need a script.

Den Lennie (8m 54s):
You can use that. You can repeat with every client to enable you to facilitate achieving that number. So we break them down into annual priorities, and then you break those down into quarterly priorities and then weekly goals. And by following this process, you end up and reviewing these every 90 days. In fact, the VBA, we repeat them every month. And over of course, for a year, you being amazed at what you can achieve. You know, I think it was Tony Robbins that said most people wildly. Over-estimate what they can achieve in one year, but then they’re wildly underestimated what they can achieve in five.

Den Lennie (9m 39s):
And I think there’s, there’s too much emphasis on the immediate gratification and, and, you know, businesses, the less, less mature businesses feel in late. They’ve gotta do it all. Now, when in actual fact, a building that solid foundation running a plan strategically on an ongoing basis will be far more sustainable than the feast and famine rollercoaster of winning a big job, putting all your effort into it. And then, and then everything else crashes and burns. So imagine what you can achieve in five years with a soul, this strategic plan, a plan that is so laser focused on working towards your goals, that it delivers the outcomes that feed your own vision of success.

Den Lennie (10m 23s):
If you have a solid strategic plan that you review regularly, then you will achieve more in the next 12 months. And you’re having the last five years, you know, five years ago, we just landed in Australia. Didn’t really know anyone living in Sydney. I’m trying to figure out how to set up, set up a business there, and actually, or we’d set up the business, but how to actually generate project work. I mean, no, we, we landed on that. The Fs five launch Phillips, that was a pretty decent project to start with, but, but then we ended up like, you know, like any other business in a city, just looking around going, well, we’ve now got this Sahm, this sad, this, this, this, this production company in these skills, but no one knows me.

Den Lennie (11m 6s):
So how do we generate income them? We had to go in and start generating, want it from scratch. So whatever it, whatever market you’re in, whatever area you’re in, you have to get clear on what needs to happen in order for you to, to drive that and the outcome and the week to do that is with a strategic plan and not talking about business plan or a strategic plan is a plan that has very specific outcome driven objectives. So a strategic plan would say, you know, in 12 months time, we will have a marketing strategy that attracts six to 10 qualified leads into our business each month generating an excess of $35,000 per month at the close rate of 50%.

Den Lennie (11m 54s):
That is a very specific strategic plan that you can then break down and work at. What are the component parts that need to happen each of those stages to make that a reality. And this is where you know that this is that this is the truth bomb, okay, this is an, there’s no shortcuts to this. And you can’t just generally you no 20 or 30 grand as with the business. And, and it keeps coming every month without an impact on capacity that, that impact on the system’s that you need to run to make that a reality. I was talking to Kayleigh bill, or that they want of my clients. And I’m, if you’re interested to actually you can get to the website and, and look under a case studies.

Den Lennie (12m 33s):
There was a great video with Kayla of talking about his journey in the VBA. I think you will find it really inspiring that Caleb hadn’t been spending time creating proposals in, in design, and they had an in-design subscription and they weren’t, and they were using it, but he was spending a lot of time creating them. And they’ve just recently moved to a proposal five and it’s cut the time of executing proposal’s dramatically. And then it was in a planning call that, that we discovered this and a planning call that he shared with us that they’d made this big shift. And even though it was like an extra 50 bucks a month for the software, the time that was saving strategically was, was quite incredible.

Den Lennie (13m 18s):
So, you know, by, by being in the VBA, we have these, the strategic planning calls every month, which means for 90 minutes, every month we get on a call and we review an annual plan and we review the quarterly plan and we review the monthly plan, depending on where we’re at on the journey. And with that adjust, we adjust the, the effort and energy accordingly to fulfill and those aspects. And that is, what’s absolutely key in this strategic plan. Not only do you create the plan, but you check in with the plan on a weekly, on a monthly and quarterly and an annual basis to make sure you’re actually on track because it’s one thing to say, well, we want to generate for a hundred thousand in revenue and 200,000 profit.

Den Lennie (14m 4s):
And that means that we need to, to, to score three, 10,000 projects a month or a three 30 or three 11 or two or three times $11,000 projects a month sounds easy in, in theory. But the reality is somewhat different because not everyone’s ready to buy right now. And so you have to be having the pipeline of opportunities are always coming through. And then what typically happens in a creative business is that we get really busy on projects and then we don’t do any marketing and then things dry up and with that and any marketing, no, that I know that the pay plan is looking a bit Lynne, and then you’ve got to kind of get back on the wagon. So what we’re always trying to do with the VBA is create consistency, create a more measured, consistent process.

Den Lennie (14m 46s):
And that that’s where you are. The folks that are in the groups have the greatest success because we have these rhythms, a, this isn’t just a coarse that it’s an ongoing coaching program that helps you develop new habits, develop a new mindset around how long things take to happen. So guys, that’s, that’s the planning section. I mean, obviously we go into an awful lot more depth in the mastermind, but I wanted to share that with you and hope you find it useful. And ah, yeah, when checkout, Caleb’s a case study on the website at denlennie.com. And listening to the How to Scale a Video Business Podcast with me at your host, Den Lennie. If you’re a video, a business owner, it’s a hit a ceiling we’ve benefit from mentorship to support and coaching and checkout how you can work with me over at denlennie.com.

Den Lennie (15m 35s):
Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the shore over on iTunes. And we really appreciate your taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don’t forget to share if you feel you’ve gotten value from this episode that 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.