Which clients have earned a bit of flexibility?

If I had to pick the one thing that’s made the biggest difference to my production business, it would be a handful of clients who keep coming back. They pay us well, we enjoy working with them and, after a while, we get to know what’s riding on a project almost as well as they do.

If you work with people in marketing or internal comms, you probably know the sort of person I mean. They’ve got a deadline and they’ll do what it takes to get the job over the line. They appreciate having someone on the production side who cares about it as much as they do. Sometimes that means I’ll answer an email at night or move something around to fit their job in.

There’s a bit of advice that goes around our industry: hold firm boundaries or clients will walk all over you. Well, some will. The pushy client who argues about every invoice doesn’t get the same treatment as the one who’s looked after us for years. I get to decide who gets that extra care.

Think about the clients you’d like to be working with in five years. Do you know what’s going on for your contact at the moment? If the only time you speak is when there’s a brief or an invoice, it might be time to give them a ring. When someone has less money to spend and more people looking over their shoulder, there’s a lot to be said for hiring a team they already trust.

Which videos can a client put off?

Imagine your contact has to take two proposals to their boss. One is for a brand film they’d love to make. The other is for a safety video they need to show every contractor before they let them on site. If money’s tight, I know which proposal I’d rather have my name on.

I think brand films and image campaigns will get harder to sell. It’s difficult to put a figure on what they’ve achieved, and it’s fairly easy to say, “Let’s look at it again next year.” I’d be cautious about recruitment videos too, unless your clients are in a field where they still can’t get enough of the right people.

I’d feel more confident offering customer case studies and testimonials. A salesperson can put one in front of a prospect who wants to hear from somebody who’s actually used the service. Training and compliance work has a clear use too. A client can look at whether people make fewer mistakes or whether workplace injuries come down after the training.

We’re also seeing demand for live streaming and webinars at Dream Engine. A client can reach a fair number of people without paying to get them all in the same room. I still expect to be filming events, although I think some of those budgets will come down. Have a look at your last few jobs. If your client had put the video off for six months, what would it have cost them? It’s a useful question when you’re deciding which services to offer.

You can cut costs and still make bad coffee

I used to do a Thursday morning bike ride. It was the hardest ride of the week, and afterwards we’d always go to the same café and complain about how bad the coffee was. In some perverse way it added to the celebration of suffering.

The bloke who ran it was lovely. We liked having a chat with him. When we first started going, he had two people working with him. Then there was one. Eventually it was just him taking the orders, making the coffee, bringing it out and preparing the food. He was incredibly efficient. I imagine each time he cut a wage it gave him a little breathing space.

One Thursday we turned up and the place was locked. We never saw him again. For all the work he’d put into running that place by himself, he still couldn’t make a good cup of coffee.

By all means open your accounting software and go through your expenses line by line. But if you’re not getting enough enquiries, or you’re quoting on plenty of jobs and losing most of them, cancelling a subscription buys you a bit of time. You still have to work out why people aren’t buying.

When can you afford to buy help?

An expense review can also show you where you’re spending too little. You might be able to fix a sales problem a lot quicker with a good coach, consultant or group of business owners who’ve dealt with it themselves. You do need to be willing to hear something you might have dismissed the first time around.

I once had a coaching client who, I later found out, had put the fee on his credit card because he didn’t have the money. He was counting on an instant win. That’s a hard position to think clearly from, particularly when the work you need to do might take months to pay off.

I’d say the same about the person promising 40 leads in your inbox every month, the pay-per-click specialist or someone selling you a prospecting list. If you need it to work straight away to cover the bill, keep your money.

AI takes practice. So does selling.

I keep seeing ads promising business owners they can put the company on autopilot, take the day off and play golf. I’ve worked for a lot of successful entrepreneurs and seen how they spend their time. Most of them are closely involved in the day-to-day running of the business.

Right now AI deserves some of that attention. I think of it like learning a language. You can read about it all you like, but eventually you have to open your mouth and have a go. A small editing job gives you something useful to practise on. You know what the result should look like and you can check it before it goes back to the client.

I’d give just as much attention to the things that haven’t changed. Before you can sell anything, you have to give somebody a reason to pay attention. “We make great videos” has never been much of a reason. Show a safety manager how another client handles contractor inductions and you’ve got something to talk about. Once you’re in that conversation, how well do you listen? Can you work out what’s worrying them about the job? Then there’s what I call the inner game of running a video business: getting to know your own habits when things get uncomfortable.

If you’ve been meaning to ring a good client for three weeks and keep finding another bit of software to try first, you probably know which one needs the practice.