In this podcast episode, we break down the phrase “fake it ‘till you make it” and talk about the practical uses and the impractical side effects.

Our three main problems with the idea of “faking it till we make it.” 

1. It never ends because there is no quantifiable “making it” period. How do you know when you’ve made it?
2. It breeds the foundation for the Imposter Syndrome. Even if you’ve gained experience, this way of thinking will knock you down into believing that you’re not supposed to be here or that you’re no good at this.  
3. It doesn’t allow you to learn and grow, because you avoid vulnerability.  

We talk about the psychology of what happens to your long-term confidence and growth and what you can do to maintain a healthy confidence level.

“Faking it” breeds a long-term identity crisis. You become obsessed with your external image and you end up putting yourself in a lot of stressful situations.     

We share stories of things that we experienced when we launched a photo portrait studio in 2013 and how “faking it till we made it” affected our business starting out and as we grew.

The Next 3 Steps to keep “fake it until you make it” in check

1. Set a goal for when you’ve “made it”. It can be a monetary amount, a certain number of clients, your number of products sold, or even a time frame. It’s entirely up to you and your business goals. But the point is to set a tangible goal and allow yourself to say you’ve “made it” and can stop “faking it”.
2. Take daily action towards “making it”.  Stop spending time, money, and energy projecting that you’ve made it and just focus on actually doing the things that put you on course to your success.
3. Find other ways to build confidence. You can do things like taking courses, networking with peers, and getting client reviews.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources

Leave a voicemail for an upcoming podcast: www.learnit-doit.com/podcast

The post The Problem With “Fake It Until You Make It” appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary

If something triggers you to get into a funk or in a bad emotional space this gives you the opportunity to do a little bit of investigative work.

Hit the pause button and pinpoint the root of these bad emotions or experiences.

We hear a lot about business owners carrying a lot of stress around.  We get it, being a business owner is by no means a walk in the park and you’re going to have rough patches, but we’ve all got to realize that we’re not in business to cause ourselves stress.

Get to the core of the issue for any particular bad day. 

Are your clients causing you stress? If so, what’s it about?  A process that you control or something outside of your control.  

Are you stressed that you don’t have enough time? Do a time audit, figure out what’s sucking away your day.  Usually, it’s tied to a lot of inefficient processes that you can easily fix with a simple plan, automation or outsourcing.

Is money your main stress? If so, it’s going to be hard to become a successful business owner if you don’t have a good relationship with money.  Figure out the root of this – is it confidence based? Is your pricing an issue? Do you not have enough clients?

Is it something going on personally? Or your lack of self-confidence?  It’s easy to let your personal life bleed into your business when you are self-employed.  Sometimes when you really look at it, it’s personal stress of bills or a lack of time to spend with your family, or maybe even a lack of support or self-confidence that it’s eating away at you.  This is why personal development is so important for self-employed business owners like us…sometimes we are our own worst enemies!

Moral of the Story – Bad days put a magnifying glass on things that are inefficient and stress-inducing.  Once you know the problem, you can work towards a solution.

Quick-Wins

1. Target the cause of your bad day.  If you can do something about it, do it.  
2. Implement changes to your workflow or processes if you’re seeing work or client related stress.
3. Always work on your personal development to stay balanced and level-headed.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

Time Audit Worksheet

4 Ways to Use Your Phone to be More Productive Video

You’re A Badass At Making Money

The post Quick-Win Episode 6: Bad Days Are A Good Thing appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

It’s inevitable that you’re going to have to deal with a situation involving a difficult client.  These situations are always challenging because of the magnitude of personal emotions that are inevitably involved.  And you’ll find, too, that as your business grows you may find some difficult situations arise with past clients that you’ve outgrown.  We talk about our experience handling these difficult situations and shed some light on what you can do to help yourself out when you feel stuck with a bad or wrong client.  

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Episode Summary 

• You can’t provide your best service when you’re working with the wrong people who are being difficult.
• It’s okay to outgrow your clients, just remember that communication is key
• A soft way to let people go is to raise your pricing.
• Don’t get caught up in the emotion of handling the situation.  Remember that this is a business decision and do what’s best for your business.
• Being honest and open is always the best policy when dealing with difficult people.

Quick-Wins

1.  Have an honest talk with your client and don’t let it linger.  Write out what you need to say, be prepared and rip the band-aid.  The sooner you do it, the sooner you can move on.
2.  Give yourself permission to outgrow your clients or pivot your business.  This is your business.
3. Utilize the idea of a third party.  When it’s bigger than just you, your clients may take it more seriously because other people are involved in the process.
4. Avoid bad clients by creating an upfront process that will allow you to find out upfront if they’re not right for you.

The post Quick-Win Episode 2: How to Handle Bad Clients appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

1. Understand that tasks take time

We’ve all made the mistake of saying “give me 10 minutes,” only to realize an hour later that you totally lost track of time.  When we used to photograph weddings, we’d have brides tell us that the church was “5 minutes away,” and on the day of the wedding, we’d be scrambling into the ceremony with seconds to spare because NOTHING takes 5 minutes. Remember that things DO take time and even writing a short email takes longer than 2 minutes, so be sure to schedule your time accordingly ; )

If you have a To-Do list sitting on your desk, do yourself a favor and write a number next to each task so you can be realistic about your day.  Resist the urge to underestimate the length of time you need. In fact, OVERestimate. No one has ever been upset that they completed something earlier than they anticipated and I assume you aren’t the first one out there who would be.

2. Be reasonable about your To-Do lists

It’s also important to break down your tasks into “accomplishable” chunks.  For example, rather than putting a giant task on our list like “edit John Smith’s video,” which could take days of work, we learned to break things down into manageable tasks that take less than 2 hours. For example, instead of:

• Edit Video A 

We’d break that major task down to:

• Load Footage (30 min)
• Organize Footage into folders (20 min)
• Make a Project file and sync footage (20 min)
• Create Markers and label favorite takes (1 hr)
• Cut the video (2 hrs)
• Edit the Audio (1 hr)
• Color the footage (2 hrs)
• Add Graphics and Text (1 hr)
• Export Draft for Review (20 min)

Not only will you be more organized about where you are in the project, you’ve now created clear start and stop points that will allow you to come back to your project, which helps you schedule realistic timeframes to get things done. 

You’ll find that once you start checking tasks off your list, you’ll be more motivated to keep going, rather than staring at the same task on your list for 3 days while you’ve been continuously working on it.  Break your TO DO list down into tasks that take 20 minutes to an hour (2 hours max) and you’ll find yourself becoming more productive and more aware of what you can handle on a normal workday, rather than totally overcommitting and coming up short and stressing out. 

Bonus Tip: Make sure to [especially if you work at a desk or workstation] get up between tasks, have a stretch, drink some water, have a snack and give yourself some credit for what you’ve just accomplished.  It’ll help keep the positive energy flowing right into your next task.

3. Control your own schedule

We used to think that we had to work around our clients’ schedules in order to be a quality and accommodating service provider.  In a lot of ways, this is true. If you are trying to win someone’s business, you want to be able to meet them where they are and work around their needs.  However, don’t let this hurt you and your business. Sometimes we feel like adjusting our schedules to help others is the only option, but the reality is, you can totally set reasonable boundaries that allow you to be more efficient without compromising your ability to accommodate the requests of your clients.

For your client, there is a very slight difference between you saying, “I’m going to be in your area on Tuesday and Friday this week, would there be a time those days that would work for you?” and saying “Whenever you are available this week, I’ll be there.”  On the flip side, there is a HUGE difference between those two scenarios for your schedule and sanity.

Do yourself a solid and resist the urge to make open-ended scheduling for your clients, partners, and colleagues.  When it’s time to schedule a meeting, always lead by providing a few options and asking if either of those options work for the person you’re meeting with.  Worst case scenario: they say those don’t work and give you some options or ask you for some more options. In both cases, YOU are in control of your schedule and still providing an awesome service.  

Bonus Tip:  We actually found that by giving the options it was actually easier to schedule with our customers and potential clients.  Giving them an open-ended option provided too many choices and proved overwhelming and easier to put off. Giving a few choices makes it an easier decision for them and a more efficient way for you to manage your days for productivity!  Win-Win!

4.  Start to automate or simplify repetitive tasks

Think about the things you do over and over again and find ways to automate them.  How could you use a software, template, process, or video to make your repetitive tasks take less time?

We work with an awesome graphic designer that sends us videos of her recorded screen while she explains her design work rather than scheduling a meeting with us to review over the phone or in-person.  This is such an efficient way to manage all of our time. We are able to move projects forward without meeting and getting distracted with side conversations, plus we can refer back to these videos at any point.

Another way we’ve improved our productivity is to create templates for emails we have to send regularly.  You may customize these messages each time depending on the details, but if there is a large chunk of what you say that is the same every time, create an email template that you can start from and save yourself a ton of time doing things over and over again.

Lastly, see what you can do to avoid wasting time on travel and unproductive meetings.  When we first started our business, we were more comfortable in person and every time we had to talk with a client or a subcontractor/team member, we’d schedule an in-person meeting.  This meant preparing for the meeting, packing up our stuff, driving to another location (dealing with traffic, etc), arriving early, conducting the meeting and then often letting things get off-topic or letting a meeting take a full hour or more even though we accomplished the goal in the first few minutes, etc.

Think about meetings you schedule that could be more productive through video, email, over the phone, or through Skype/video chat.  A meeting that could take up 2 hours of your day could be shortened to 1 hour or less if you don’t have to leave your office!

Now that we’ve shared a few ways to improve your productivity (and sanity) let’s put this stuff to good use.  Start to use these tactics in your business and let us know how they work for you! Or, if you have any other tips you’ve implemented that have worked well for you, we want to hear about them.  

Let’s get more done in less time!

The post 4 Simple Tips to Be More Productive! appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Why did we decide to write our first course on “How to Write, Shoot, Edit & Share Videos for your Marketing?”  

The answer is pretty simple.  Professional video is pretty expensive — however, extremely beneficial.  A lot of business owners see the price of video production and immediately dismiss it — completely ignoring how effective it can be for their business.

In addition, every single one of us has the means to create effective video content with the device that is in our pocket right now.  By now, we all know the statistics that video marketing far outweighs plain text and graphics — but still, tons of business owners drag their feet when it comes to creating video content for their marketing.

IN-HOUSE TRAINING

For over a decade now, we’ve been producing professional video content for small businesses.  During this time we’ve also been hired to train marketing teams and employees how to create effective videos.  Most of those companies had us come in and teach the basics of how to produce a video in a four-hour training session.  By the end of the session, our students were able to film and edit a quick video for social sharing on their own.  

Once we knew it would work, we decided that we’d not only teach people how to film a video, but we’d focus on how to write and plan a video.  You’ve never watched a video just for its quality, right? You usually watch it because of its content. So we took our 4-hour, in-person video training outline, and wrote an entire course on how to write, shoot, edit, and share videos for your marketing.

We want everyone to be able to use video to help their business grow.  Why? Because we know how valuable it will be for you. There are numerous applications [testimonials, sales, promotions, training, reviews, etc] for video, and most importantly, it allows you to engage with your audience in a way that other media can’t.

CASE STUDY 1

During our Beta-Test group for the course, we sent the course to a friend of ours who is the head of marketing at her company.  Since her company was trying to incorporate more video content into their marketing plans, she asked if she could share the course with her team members, to see if they could learn exactly what they needed in order to make quality video content for the company on their own.  

After taking the course this is what one of her team members had to say.

“This course covers most, if not all, of the information I spent weeks going over in college classes that were very expensive. Pair this material with some practice making your own videos and you will have a recipe for success. – Liam M.”

Just a week after finishing the course, her team member Liam was able to create and fully produce a Team Member Spotlight video with interviews, B-roll, and basic animation that they were able to share socially and on their website blog!

Now the team can produce their own in-house videos for their daily social sharing and they’re seeing their social post engagement grow.  In addition, their C-Suite is very excited to jump into regular video production both in-house and professionally produced. That’s a Win-Win.

CASE STUDY 2

Another member of our Beta-Test group is a self-employed business owner who provides IT consulting for local businesses.  He took the course thinking that he could use it to help train his internal team and save himself some time repeating certain processes over and over.  While taking the course, a client of his needed to know how to set something up on their computer for a new employee. Rather than packing up and heading to their office, he decided to give video content a try!  Using what he learned in this course, he recorded his screen and walked the client through each step of the process and sent it over via email. The client was instantly able to see how to do the process on their own and now will always have that video as a reference when this particular need arises again.  This saves the business owner time and it saves their client money. Another Win-Win!

WHO IS THIS FOR?

Whether you are a self-employed business owner, a small business owner, or you’re in charge of a marketing department — you will benefit from this course.

We’ve broken our entire creative process apart into bite-sized pieces so that you can learn how to come up with ideas and organize your script and plans, all the way to how to edit and upload your video to different sharing platforms.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to come up with good ideas for video content
• How to write a script
• How to plan your shoot
• What gear you need to be successful
• How to get good shots
• How to load and organize your footage
• How to edit your story
• How to prep your video for sharing

WHAT ARE THE DETAILS?

This course is entirely self-paced, meaning you can go through it as quickly or slowly as you would like.  Once you purchase the course, you will always have access to it, so you are free to take your time with the material and come back to it for reference at any time.

This course is filled with video explanations, written lessons, PDF downloadable worksheets, helpful visuals, and sample videos that peel back the curtain on every step of the video-making process.  By the time you finish the course, you won’t only have learned how to make a video for your marketing, you will have already made your first video!  This is why throughout the course we created DO IT assignments that walk you through each step of the video-making process with examples, visuals, and hands-on worksheets.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

Our course, “How to Write, Shoot, Edit, and Share Video Content for your Marketing” is available on our website at www.LearnIt-DoIt.com/courses for $499.  This price includes forever-access to the course, and a 20-minute, ideas consult call with us, where we can help you generate video content ideas for your specific business to help you get started on your video making journey!

The post Enhance Your Brand’s Visibility with Video appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

In our maiden voyage of the Learn It – Do It Podcast we introduce ourselves and give you a little insight on what this show will be about.  We’re a husband and wife team who’ve been in business for ourselves since the fall of 2008. We share our story of how we jumped feet first into being self-employed entrepreneurs and discuss how we navigated the challenging task of creating our own opportunities in business.  Over the last 10+ years, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and we noticed that almost everyone struggles with similar challenges. We decided to focus this podcast on the topics of Content & Marketing, Business Strategy and Personal Development, because no matter what industry you are in or what your business is, these topics play a crucial role in running a successful business.

Episode 0 Summary

• We introduce ourselves as business owners and podcast hosts
• We talk about our qualifications and experience in this space
• We share why we wanted to start this podcast
• We tell you what this podcast will be about and talk about who it’s for
• We describe the show format and episode details

Recommended Resources 

Check out our creative media agency: 

Do Something Different Media – www.dosomethingdifferentmedia.com

If you want to apply to be a guest on the podcast head over to www.learnit-doit.com/podcast

The post Episode 0 – Who are Rhi & Pete and What’s this Podcast All About? appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

We are launching a podcast!  Our goal is to provide resources and education to the self-employed business owner who’s in the trenches day in and day out.  And to that end, we figured that in addition to the online course material, blogs, and free downloads, we’d create a bi-monthly podcast to provide you with more real-life, valuable information.

WHAT IS THE LEARN IT – DO IT PODCAST ABOUT?

(the official Podcast Intro Description)

“Welcome to the Learn It – Do It Podcast. We focus on content & marketing, business strategy and personal development for self-employed entrepreneurs. Each episode will feature a live coaching call with a small business owner just like you – where we will tackle a specific challenge and develop a plan of action to overcome it.”

We want to unpack what it is like to run a business day-to-day. There’s so much involved with running a business that most of us are never taught, and being in business for yourself is challenging. Each week, we’ll roll up our sleeves and pull back the curtain into real small businesses so that we can help solve problems and develop solutions for growth.

No matter what industry, or whether you’re a product or service provider, we all face similar challenges each day — especially if you’re the one wearing all the hats.

WHAT IS THE FORMAT FOR THE LEARN IT – DO IT PODCAST?

Each episode will be hyper-focused on a particular topic [or challenge] faced by our guest.  Rhi and I will introduce the concepts and premise of the topic and then we’ll share a live coaching call with a real business owner.

Our guest will introduce their business and describe the main challenge that they are currently struggling with.  We’ll have a conversation that dives deep into the specific topic and by the end of the episode, we’ll come up with the next three steps to solve it.  The whole point of this coaching call is for our guest to leave the call with an action plan that they can start implementing right away.

As a listener, you’ll be able to relate to similar challenges you face with content & marketing, business strategy, and personal development and you’ll immediately be able to utilize the next three steps for yourself in your own business.

WHEN WILL THE LEARN IT – DO IT PODCAST BE AVAILABLE?

Twice a month we’ll be publishing new episodes of the Learn It – Do It Podcast.  Each episode will be 30-60 minutes in length [mainly because some topics are cumbersome and we want to make sure that our guests get a proper plan of action before the end of the episode].

HOW DO I GET ON THE LEARN IT – DO IT PODCAST?

In order to be a guest on the show, head over to the podcast page and fill out a brief digital interview.  If you have more than one challenge you’re interested in discussing, feel free to fill out more than one form.  While it is not guaranteed that every applicant gets a coaching call, we will be reading each submission and truly appreciate your interest in being a guest.  We rely on submissions from listeners just like you and will choose the topics that we know will best suit our listeners and help us cover a variety of challenges that are relatable.

WHERE CAN I LISTEN IN?

Our podcast will be launching in September and will be published on our website biweekly.  You can also subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.

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