My Video Business Grew by 500% After Reading This Book - The big 3 lessons!

When I first started running my video production company, I hit a wall pretty quickly. I had a hard time trusting people to do any directing, shooting, or editing in the first couple of years.

So what I would do was try to do everything. The only times I relied on help was on the client management side, producing an animation, because I was simply not good at any of those things. I only hired other shooters and editors if I could directly oversee everything.

Lots of other small production companies I saw had a similar problem/
The owner or owners didn’t want to hire help in any of the creative elements of a production. Just like me, they would go on every single job.

We were all convinced everything would fall apart if we let go of control.

Even in some cases, where I knew for sure that another DP would do a better job, I would still hire myself into the job as a DP only to save on the cost of hiring someone else when I could just do the job myself.

Even though the first year had rapid growth, everything got flat. I was still making so much more money than when I was freelancing, but I really had made a freelance job for myself. I wasn’t really a business owner even though I had some help. I was a freelancer at my own company.

I knew as long as I did that, I couldn’t keep growing and I couldn’t have any freedom. I would have to take on every job if we wanted it.

So I went on a search for an answer. How do I expand and let go of some control?

After reading a few books, I came across E-Myth revisited. This book literally broke down my situation to a T. You ever watch a YouTube video or read a book and get the feeling that the person is talking directly to you? From everything I’ve read and watched, this book is among the top 5 that completely changed my life and business.

And it turns out, this is a very common problem with business owners starting out. They can’t let go of control and they don’t trust anyone to do the job as well as they can. So they become an employee at their own company instead of a business owner.

I highly recommend you read this book, but let me give you three big takeaways here that were really eye-opening for me.

The first point the book makes is most people that start a business think they can do it because they understand the technical work of that business that does that technical work and he calls this the root cause of failure for most businesses.

The second point of the book is that there are 3 different people stuck in every single business owner. There is the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician. And in most cases, it’s not a balanced division and those 3 people don’t get along. This internal war actually carries over to your personal life and it’s hard to turn it off.

Most of us our technicians, so we think that if you want it done right, do it yourself.

Then the goal is to create a business, where you have a balance. You want to create a business that is not a prison of your own making. A business that doesn’t rely 100% on your every action to exist. A business where you don’t have to be there all the time. The problem is that in the beginning, the technician is at the wheel 70% of the time. That doesn’t leave enough room for the manager or the entrepreneur to thrive. You don’t know any other way. So you have to wake the person that’s been asleep within you.

The third point is about the three stages of business, infancy, adolescence, and maturity.

Most of us get stuck in infancy forever. This is where you are a glorified freelancer. You work for yourself, but you do all the work. You’re now doing the technical position, but also have to learn things you never knew how to do before to keep the business alive.

The whole point of creating a business is to expand beyond yourself.

The solution in the book is to slowly delegate things to other people that the technician in you is currently doing. I use a lot of freelancers to help in this stage. If you don’t want to make a more significant commitment here, you can do this job by job.

The next step is to start working on your business instead of in your business. As long as you are the technician full-time, you won’t be able to commit enough time to the business in the way that you need to and you become a more stressed-out freelancer.

And once you changed your mindset and start taking those steps toward creating a real business, you need to create a system. A system that doesn’t require the best people to run. A system is so clear to understand that good freelancers or employees could follow.

Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/user/NewSlateFilms?sub_confirmation=1

If you want to turn your freelance business into a video production company, check out Video Production Accelerator. https://www.filmmakingmentor.com/