Field Guides / Coaching
Hire a specialist video business coach when most of your problems come from how video gets quoted, made and delivered: quotes that leak margin, revision rounds that eat profit, a business that stops when you stop shooting. A strong generalist can serve you well when the problem is one any small business has. Either way, sort your problems first and test the coach on your industry before you pay.
The choice matters because a video production company has failure modes a generalist has to learn before they can coach them, and you pay for that learning time.
Project work brings lumpy cash flow. Scope creeps through revision rounds nobody defined. Pre-production gets given away because nobody put it on the quote. The owner books themselves onto every shoot because nobody else can be trusted with the camera, and hides in the edit because it feels safer than selling. Clients don't care about gear, codecs or creative vision. They care about results, budget and timelines. A coach who has run a production company has seen all of this from the inside.
That doesn't make every generalist the wrong choice. Plenty of problems aren't specific to video at all: running a team meeting that ends with decisions, reading a profit and loss statement, holding a difficult conversation with a staff member. A good generalist with a strong record on those can be the right hire. The question is which kind of problem you'd be bringing.
The method is to write down your problems, sort each one into industry or general, then test any coach you're considering against the industry ones.
Copy and paste: the sorting test
Problem: [one sentence]
Would a dental practice or an accounting firm have this exact problem? [yes or no]
Does the answer depend on how video gets quoted, shot, edited, revised or delivered? [yes or no]
If the first answer is yes and the second is no, mark it general. Otherwise, mark it industry.
Copy and paste: five questions to test a coach on video production
1. Have you run a video production company yourself, and for how long?
2. Walk me through how you'd structure the quote for a two-day corporate shoot with three edits.
3. What do you tell an owner whose client keeps asking for another round of changes?
4. I'm on every shoot. What would you have me hand over first, and to whom?
5. How many video production owners have you worked with, and what happened to their numbers?
| Question | A specialist's answer usually covers |
|---|---|
| The two-day shoot quote | Separate sections for pre-production, production and post, a contingency line, and a production company fee on top |
| Another round of changes | Defining a round on the quote, pricing the extra round before round one starts, counting rounds at every delivery |
| Handing over the shoot | Which role to hand over first, what gets written down before it's handed over, and how you check the work |
| Their numbers | A figure with a method behind it, across a stated number of owners, that you can check |
Here's a made-up owner in round numbers, to show the sort in practice.
The owner runs a production company at about $400,000 a year and writes down three problems. Quotes keep going out without a production company fee. The weekly team meeting runs for two hours and decides nothing. Every shoot still needs the owner behind the camera.
| Problem | Sorting test | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| No production company fee on quotes | Depends on how video gets quoted | Industry |
| The team meeting decides nothing | A dental practice could have this exact problem | General |
| The owner is on every shoot | Depends on how video gets shot and who's trusted to shoot it | Industry |
Two of the three are industry problems, so this owner shortlists coaches who have run a production company, and asks each one the five questions. If the list had come out two general and one industry, a strong generalist would have been a fair choice, with the industry problem tested separately.
Four mistakes send owners to the wrong kind of coach.
VBA coaching is specialist. Den Lennie spent three decades in production, starting in broadcast TV, and ran his own production company for about a decade. VBA sells one programme, the Elite Boardroom: $1,700 USD a month, flat, cancel anytime, no application, and month one is the fit test. If most of your problems sorted as general, a good generalist may serve you as well, and that's a fine choice. Below about $150,000 a year, the baseline rather than the test, the free Field Guides are the better starting point. More on the video business coach page.
If most of the problems you'd bring to the first call depend on how video gets quoted, made and delivered, hire someone who has run a video production company; if most don't, a strong generalist will do. Benchmark: three problems sorted with the test question, and five industry questions put to every coach on the shortlist. There's a comparison of the leading video production business coaches if you want the specialist field in one place.
Which of these have you taken on or put in place recently?
What's the one thing you can commit to implementing this week? If you're not sure, start here.
Write your three problems down and run each one through the sorting test. It takes ten minutes, and it tells you which kind of coach to shortlist before you book a single call.
One thing executed every week creates 50 strategic moves a year.
Questions like these come up regularly on our weekly Elite Boardroom calls. If you'd like someone to hold you to account each week, and to learn from a group of peers who run video businesses too, the Boardroom is for you.
Related tools and guides. Comparison of video production business coaches, How to price a video project, Anatomy of a Profitable Quote, How many revision rounds to include, What video business coaching costs, Field Guides.