Vision to Victory: Transforming Dreams into Tangible Success

Episode Transcription

 G’day guys, it’s Den here in a very echoey studio today. This is episode 330 of the How to Scale a Video Business podcast. And today I want to tell you  why I’m sounding echoey. And if you listened last week, you’ll know we are moving house and moving office. But today I wanted to share a personal story with you.

A story that started when we began this business in the UK in 2009,  almost 14 years ago. And What moving to this new house means to us in terms of  staying focused on your dreams, being very focused on your direct activity to make those dreams a reality every day, but also the journey it took us to here and to give you some perspective on  the element of patience that’s required when you build a business. To fund the life you have dreamed of.  

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business with your host, Den Lennie. Discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. Enjoy this episode. 

So I thought it’d be interesting to share. the journey with you on how we’ve come to this point in our lives  because I think when you start a business it’s initially because you want to create some freedom and you want to make some money. You want to know, just for me, it was about separating myself from having a boss.

I didn’t want to work for someone else and had to ask another grown man if I could take some time off because I wanted to book a holiday because it was a deal that I want to take advantage of without checking with him first. And that was really important for me.  And your reasons might be different, but the first few years of running a business are very hard because the reality of running a business is somewhat different to what you perceive it to be and it’s very easy to give up when things get hard. 

As you go on, I remember having a conversation with Frieder Hochheim, who is the founder of Kino Flo. And he said to me, you know, Den, if you can make it past year one, you’re doing okay. If you can get to year five. then, then you’re, you’re in business. So the first five years really are very risky in a business because if you don’t stay fully alert and aware of every single decision you make,  being very acutely aware of your numbers, where you’re spending money, are you making sure enough sales are coming in?

It’s very, very challenging, but beyond five years, five to 10 years, and you start to find the groove, you start to find rhythm in how you operate your business day to day and then 10 years and beyond, you really get into a flow state. And what I found is you start to simplify your business and streamline your business and offer less services.

To fewer people, but those people are of a higher quality and are a better fit for where you are at in your journey. And so that’s the point. We are at, we are at, I think, year 14.  And you know, probably for the first 10 years I was working seven days a week. And we were always profitable, but the cash flow wasn’t always there.

And now we’re in a position where cash flow is good, profit is good, and I’m able to work less and make more. But that’s taken me 14 years, and the business still is quite reliant on me, so my next five or six years will be very much based around removing myself from the day to day requirements of the business.

And I have an amazing team and a lot of support, and so we’re on the way to doing that.  But today I wanted to talk a bit more about, you know, why we do what we do. And, you know, the very first thing we do inside the VBA is we do a vision board.  We want to get very, very clear on what your version of success looks like, feels like, sounds like and tastes like.

Because everyone’s version of success is different. And very few people really want to have fast cars and, and like, you know, those kinds of lifestyles. I’m not saying you shouldn’t if you want to,  but I think most people I come into contact with just want to have a nice life, have a nice home, have time to spend with the kids, have time to go on adventures, time to create memories. 

And that’s very much mine and Sam’s view. We love the finer things in life, like we love flying business class. So we’ve been fortunate to fly first class a few times. I’ve been talking about that in my groups actually, how to hack that sort of thing by using different points aggregators. But more importantly is creating a stream of income, doing something that you love.

with people that you really enjoy spending time with, and that’s very much how I’ve crafted and created the VBA and it’s taken a few years to get there, but I genuinely love my clients. I genuinely love hanging out with them. We are going to get together next week  in Melbourne for our twice yearly VBA Elite Mastermind event and a few of the regular elites have got projects on and couldn’t make it.

And so I opened the doors to some of our uplevel clients and we’ve got five members of our uplevel program coming to spend the day. with the elite mastermind. I’m super excited to hang out with those guys. Some of those guys have had tremendous success and it’s the first time I’m going to get a chance to meet them.

So I’m super excited to see those guys. And so, the thing I want to talk about today is, you know, we moved to Australia in 2015. It was a dream to live in an environment where the climate was better, there’s more outdoors things to do, and I just love the Australian landscape. I find it very inspiring. 

Now we lived in Sydney for four years, we moved around, we rented a lot, and then we moved up to the Sunshine Coast to a place called Noosa. And then we were able to buy a house. So it took us six years to buy a house, five and a half, six years to buy a house. And you know, we were able to buy this house by the beach down in Bokarina.

And it’s been amazing. It’s been incredible. It’s a four bedroom house. It’s 280 square meters, which is about 2, 800 square feet. It’s a hundred meters from the beach. We’ve got wonderful neighbours, made a lot of beautiful friends here.  But when we lived in the UK, we lived in the country. We lived in the country in the north of Essex. 

And Sam just always wanted to live back in the country. And before we bought this house, we almost bought a house on one acre of land up in a place called Eumundi here on the Sunshine Coast. And it just didn’t quite work out because at the time, the internet providers were not really up to the job. 

Thankfully today, we have Starlink, and thanks to Elon Musk, and thanks to Starlink, we’re actually going to move to one and a half, nearly two acres up about 40 minutes drive from here,  inland very, very soon. And on that property is a beautiful house, there’s a separate office and studio where I can basically put my drums and have an office and a cinema, and we’ve got about one and a half to nearly two acres of land.

With, you know, orchards and fields and trees, and it really is a dream come true, it’s spectacular that we’ve been able to achieve this, but I wanted to give you context on the journey that’s got us to here, like we always had in mind the house we dreamed of, and we just kept looking and we kept looking, we kept looking, and then we discovered it, and we were able to create a deal whereby that person would wait for us to sell our house,  in order for them for us to purchase their house.

Now it became very tricky after a while because we had a certain deadline for that and the deadline passed and they started showing it to other people so we had this terrible situation where at any second the deal could have fallen over.  Now what I did strategically was I made sure we used the same agent on both properties and that gave us a certain amount of continuity in messaging and interfacing with the client, both on the other side and here that everybody knew what was going on and, and the great news is we managed to get that all over the line and we were going to settle in about a week and a half, two weeks time. 

So I guess the moral of the story is when I built my vision board for this year, yeah.  I had  a house in the country on that vision board  and it became reality and it became reality by me serving my clients by helping them grow their business and in turn they helped me grow mine and I think that’s what’s so wonderful about running a business that is aligned to your values, that is closely aligned to your purpose.

My highest purpose is helping people succeed. And so in business, helping videographers succeed in business is my highest aligned purpose. And so if you can find  a target market that aligns with your values and you can create content for them in a way that means they appreciate you, they enjoy working with you, they see you as an extension of their team, you see them as an extension of yours.

That is the Nirvana and it’s really the goal of all business is to work with aligned clients. And so I want to encourage you to think about that over the next couple of weeks. Now, next week I’m in Melbourne with the elites and the week after we’re moving house. So there’ll probably be a couple of weeks break on the podcast till we get into the new property set up, get the Starlink set up.

So in the meantime, please do enjoy any one of the 330 episodes we have of our podcast or swing into the free group. At scale, your video business go to videobusinessaccelerator.com, click on the free group and you can get some free resources there. And in the meantime, wish me luck with packing and I will talk to you in a couple of weeks. 

You’ve been listening to the video business accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lennie. If you’re a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship support and weekly accountability. Then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes. And we’d really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.