Time to gear up for the last quarter of 2021.

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (1s):
G’day, guys! Den here with episode number 223 of the How to Scale video business podcast. Here we are October the fifth can’t believe it’s October already, it’s insane. We have just come off our weekly coaching call with the VBA mastermind, and this is the final quarterly planning session for the year. So I want to just share a bit about why planning is so important and shared a bit of feedback that we have from the call to try and help you understand if you’re not currently a planner, why it’s so critically important.

Den Lennie (47s):
So, you know, without a plan, you’re just kind of shooting blind. And the first thing we want to do is, is understand, you know, where, what do you want out of your business? It’s, it’s easy to just get stuck in the doing like, you know, when a job produce a job, when a job produce a job, but when you want to start thinking strategically about, you know, the outcomes you want to have for your business, the best place to start is what does success look like to you? Where do you want your business to be? And how do you want your business to fund your life?

Den Lennie (1m 27s):
A lot of people don’t spend the time really digging into this to think about this. And I was reflecting on the vision boards that I’ve created since 2013, that was in 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019. I’m juicing another one. So my, my cycle for creating vision boards is about every two years. And a vision board is just, is a simply, it’s a collection of images that represents the life I’m looking to build. And this has been a powerful process. I first learned about it in about 2010 from a guy called Eben pagan, who was a mentor of mine.

Den Lennie (2m 8s):
And the vision board is really your future goal. You know, what are you looking to try and achieve with your business? Is it, is it family focused? Is it, is it lifestyle focused? Is it a mixture of both? And so the vision board is, is your future goal where you are today is, is based on data. So, you know, we, we do an audit, which is like, you know, which client clients you working with, which ones are the most profitable, which ones are purveying the highest yield for the least amount of work. And, and the gap is where your strategic plan needs to go.

Den Lennie (2m 50s):
And so we’re at the point now where we’re at the point end of the year, where there’s one quarter to go of this calendar year. And so Dallas thing to bear in mind is coming up to Christmas is December as a pretty disrupted month. And so really we haven’t got 12 or 13 weeks left there this year. We’ve probably got eight or nine workable weeks. So when you start to put it in those terms, it starts to get kind of helps you focus your attention. And, and you always want to go back to the sort of DNA of your business, which is, you know, purpose, mission and plan, you know, purpose is why do you exist? Are you just a video production company that makes videos, or are you looking to try and tap into a higher perspective and your mission?

Den Lennie (3m 36s):
What, what is the financial goal? What is the revenue goal? What is the profit goal? How many customers do you want to have? Where are they? What kind of price point do you want to be at? And, and then that their strategic plan is how are you going to pull this all together? How are you actually going to do it? Because if you just continually sell and deliver and sell and deliver and want to get bigger and bigger and bigger, then you’re going to find yourself hitting a wall. You’re going to hit a wall. You’re going to burn out, are you going to drop the ball? And so you need to be very mindful not to just be, you know, firing blind. And, and I love this quote from Jocko Willink.

Den Lennie (4m 16s):
And he says, if you stop looking for a shortcut and you find your discipline and your will, then you will find your freedom. And what he means by that is that I think all too often in business, and particularly in video businesses, we don’t have a lot of discipline around the business and commerce side of things. You know, maybe you invoice late, maybe you don’t do your books on time. It’s really important that you track the right data and you do it in a sustainable rhythmic fashion. You know, you need to optimize every part of your business, your marketing process and your marketing, as you know, your, your outbound awareness campaigns, then you’ve got, how do you nurture prospects into your funnel?

Den Lennie (5m 2s):
And then how do you nurture those prospects into a point where the know, like, and trust you so that when they are ready to buy you become the obvious choice. And what about your sales process? Do you have a high converting sales process? And do you know what your conversion rates are and your clients, are they, are they buying from you more than once? Or are you just selling them from one time? Are you getting reviews? Are you getting referrals? And then when it comes to delivery, how much capacity do you have? Can you run multiple productions simultaneously without you needing to be there?

Den Lennie (5m 44s):
And then as you, as you develop that, you know, what is your operations look like? Are you documenting and systemizing your operations every step of the way? And you have to track that you have to track how well that is going in your business, but really more than that is you are the constraint and your business, all of that stuff around marketing sales, clients, prospects, it doesn’t matter a huge deal if you are the biggest bottleneck in your business. And so the secret is to remove that big bottleneck, which is you, the business owner. And we do that by optimizing yourself and creating systems for success by optimizing your energy, optimizing the way in which you process work, and you execute, you optimize the results you get, and you optimize the way in which you measure things.

Den Lennie (6m 39s):
And it’s that process that helps you to achieve outcomes that are predictable and sustainable. So at the nine month part of this year, you want to be tracking, you know, how’s your revenue generation going at the three quarter mark of the year. Are you, are you on target? What are your constraints? Where are your bottlenecks and is your marketing working? And within the VBA, we have a very involved sort of monthly business analysis tracking matrix, which just tracks about eight or nine different metrics in your business. And it lets, you know, if you are on target or not, and then you simply have to start looking to prioritize for the next three months and make sure you’re tracking the right data.

Den Lennie (7m 26s):
And you’ve built em, great rhythm to ensure that you are on target. And, and so we measure this quarterly goal and we analyze the last 30 days of the last month and we set the course of the next quarter, but also the next month. And it’s this process of rhythm that helps business owners maintain a very solid focus on deliberate outcomes that are going to deliver tangible, predictable results. And if say that, that predictability is, it comes from the systemization of the planning. So a, you know, it’s something to think about that. If you’re not currently planning, then you should consider it, ask yourself, this has owning your own video business, being everything you dreamed it would be when you first got started.

Den Lennie (8m 16s):
It might be hard to admit, but think about whether you’re genuinely achieving everything you set out to. When you made that decision to grab the camera and go it alone. Are you really working less? Are you really earning more? And are you really in control? Chances are you’re bloody good at what you do, but you’re having to work like a dog 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 your own video company. When you’re 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 stress is the last thing you need. When you’re trying to run a profitable company that supports you and the people you care about.

Den Lennie (8m 60s):
Truth is a business that provides financial professional and personal freedom really is achievable, but maybe you’ve got that nagging feeling that you’re overworked, lacking stability 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 unique 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.