[00:00:10.450] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.940] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.400] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:13.290] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Thinker.
[00:00:15.440] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.
[00:00:27.100] - Taylor
Welcome back again, as we say every single week.
[00:00:29.500] - Gordon
We do. And it's nice to welcome people I think. It's always nice to be nice. So news this week - Rishi Sunak did his announcements during the week. What was it, on Wednesday. And there's some pros and some cons there. If you're a self-employed business person. I think we're going to have to wait and see how it pans out really to see if we've actually come out better or worse. But...
[00:01:00.030] - Taylor
There was something for I think it was the people that are employed doing like, if you earn under £12,000 or something, whatever the cap is, you don't pay national insurance, they're removing that.
[00:01:12.710] - Gordon
Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, we will see. I think it's a bit of a swings and roundabouts on this one, because I think a lot of people are going to end up still paying the same, if not very nearly the same from one place and not the other. So we shall have to see.
[00:01:33.280] - Taylor
I wouldn't recommend putting a swing on a roundabout, it sounds quite dangerous.
[00:01:36.610] - Gordon
Yeah, I think you're right. That's very dangerous. Let's not do that. Oh, perfect, my phone's going. Someone's trying to call me. They can go to the answer phone. So let's jump into our topics. Unless you have any other news?
[00:01:50.260] - Taylor
No, nothing from me.
[00:01:50.920] - Gordon
Okay. Oh, a little bit of news; we had Apple went down during the week just for a short while, but that's quite a major thing for Apple services to go down. They had a big announcement, a week ago?
[00:02:06.010] - Taylor
Something like that, yeah.
[00:02:07.070] - Gordon
And it was about, basically the thing that came out of it was the "Mac Studio," which is their sort of new desktop machine. It's like a really tall Mac mini, but it has some incredible power in it, including the M1 Ultra, which is just phenomenal.
[00:02:32.430] - Taylor
One thing that kind of does go to show with the way that Apple have built their entire ecosystem and all of their applications is that, even if one or two systems go down, that doesn't affect the entire system. So although they had kind of a quarter of their systems go down, because they were not all kind of connected, you haven't got all your eggs in one basket; it means that not every single system and kind of software and application they have goes down. So that's a good takeaway to kind of think about is, do you have one fail safes, but also do you have everything kind of containerized I guess, dockerized, where things aren't going to trigger each other, if one thing goes down it doesn't trigger...
[00:03:20.700] - Gordon
Not like domino's.
[00:03:21.310] - Taylor
Yeah, basically. I guess you have that with like a switchboard. If you're an electrician, you have all your different circuits that control different parts of the house. So if one of them gets tripped, you don't trip the whole house, for example.
[00:03:34.270] - Gordon
Yeah. And having Apple go down just goes to show that even the biggest companies in the world have problems at some point. It's the processes you have in place to fix those issues and how quickly, because every minute that Apple is down, they are losing millions of pounds. So they need it to get back up really quickly.
[00:04:01.310] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:02.020] - Gordon
Anyway, let's get to our topics. Would you like to start or shall I?
[00:04:05.260] - Taylor
I'll start this week.
[00:04:05.930] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:04:06.620] - Gordon
So my topic is the 80/20 rule. So this is a concept where the last 20% takes 80% of your time. There we go, got it right. And it's kind of been quite apparent for me. I've had quite a few projects that are kind of pretty much there and finished. And it's these last few bits that just need finalizing, making sure they're perfect and they're optimized and everything has kind of been set up properly that takes the most of my time. And it's what's caused the projects just to take a tiny bit longer, just because there's so many things you've just got to go through a checklist, make sure things are connected up and all of that stuff. And yeah, it's just something that really kind of I experienced quite a bit this past couple of weeks.
[00:05:06.840] - Gordon
Something with the 80/20 rule, which is quite interesting is that as you get more well known, 80% of your work comes from only 20% of your customer base.
[00:05:19.950] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:19.950] - Gordon
Which basically means that you're ending up doing a lot of work for a small number of customers. Which is good in a way, because it means you've got an idea of how these people like to work and what they like and how they like it done, etc, etc. The downside to that comes is if that 20% close down or if they move to a new owner or whatever it is, all of a sudden you can lose 80% of your business just like that, which is another really big...
[00:06:01.960] - Taylor
Which again goes back to that kind of making sure you don't have all your eggs in one basket, where you make sure you have enough of a mixture of different types of clients, but also companies and clients that aren't connected at all, because you'll get referrals from your own clients. But obviously, those clients will normally know the new clients that you bring in. And so if you have a bad experience with one, that could have a domino effect, again with that. But also again, you've got that same issue as if they're in the same industry and the same thing happens, your whole entire industry, for some reason may have basically gone out of action because something out of your control, like covid, that's pretty much all your income gone. So making sure that you can niche down, but also make sure you've got a variety and a collection of different clients from different places and areas.
[00:06:59.290] - Gordon
Yeah. The other thing with 80/20 is that you could get 20% of your income from 80% of your customer base, and vice versa. Which, again, is a really interesting statistic. The 80/20 rule applies to lots of different things. It's well worth looking into if you've never heard about it. Just do a search on Google for the 80/20 rule.
[00:07:25.380] - Taylor
Yeah. It's normally either to do with time, how much effort you've got to put in, how much money you make from something. It's a really interesting concept.
[00:07:40.170] - Gordon
And weirdly, it comes true in so many different ways. Once you start analyzing all these things, you'll suddenly find this 80/20 rule, or very close to it, coming into effect more than you would expect.
[00:07:56.680] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:57.360] - Gordon
Much more. So, yeah, very interesting.
[00:08:00.000] - Taylor
That was my topic for this week.
[00:08:02.030] - Gordon
Okay. So, my topic is the downturn of DVDs. So what do I mean by this? Well, DVDs used to be the way of watching a film. If you decided you were going to watch a film that night, you would put a DVD on. And I have a huge library of DVDs. I used to go and buy one or two a week.
[00:08:29.290] - Taylor
From Blockbuster?
[00:08:30.590] - Gordon
No, not from Blockbuster. From HMV, in fact.
[00:08:35.090] - Taylor
Wow. Okay.
[00:08:35.690] - Gordon
Yeah. I used to meet up with my friend Marc at a shopping centre. We used to have something to eat, have a look around the shops, meet in the Apple store, and then go to the cinema. And quite often we'd go to HMV and I'd buy a film that either I really enjoyed or one I really wanted to see. And I spent quite a lot of money on them. They used to be sort of £15 £16 ago. And so I've got a huge library. However, I'm sitting in my lounge and we don't have a DVD player in this room.
[00:09:07.150] - Taylor
No.
[00:09:07.740] - Gordon
I do have one in the car. Come to that in another episode. I do have one on the computer. I do have one in my office. So I do have ways of watching DVDs.
[00:09:18.390] - Taylor
So yeah, because we got rid of the DVD because I had a PS3 and a PS4, which took both blue ray and DVDs.
[00:09:26.470] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:09:26.470] - Taylor
So you decided to kind of get rid of it because...
[00:09:28.680] - Gordon
Well, it was duplicating functionality. We didn't need two DVD players in here. And then...
[00:09:34.210] - Taylor
I sold my PS4 to focus on education and work, and so we didn't have a DVD player.
[00:09:42.280] - Gordon
Yeah. And I didn't put a new DVD player in because...
[00:09:45.750] - Taylor
We didn't really miss it.
[00:09:45.750] - Gordon
I waited until we'd need one. We needed one. And we haven't actually needed one up to this point. But thereby lies a problem for me. Every year I film several things, several different shows as an annual thing that I do. And the delivery method for me has always been DVDs because it's a way for me to earn some money on the project. So, for example, there's a dance school show, and I don't charge the dance school anything for filming it. It's a whole day of my time, plus editing. So it's a two camera shoot. Editing takes maybe four, five days. So we're looking at nearly a week's work here. And the way that I cover my time and my effort for this is that I sell DVDs to the students at the dance school. And it's a large enough dance school for me to sell a reasonable number to cover my costs. However, as we go forward and move on in time, more and more people are telling me they don't have DVD players, and maybe the only place they have one these days will be on an older laptop.
[00:11:09.060] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:10.470] - Gordon
We've got a brand new laptop here, and this doesn't have a DVD player. And Apple DVD players in laptops just haven't existed for maybe ten years.
[00:11:22.170] - Taylor
About that.
[00:11:22.170] - Gordon
So it's becoming more and more of a problem. If I don't have a way to make my money by selling DVDs to people, how do I distribute a film that I've made; in this case the dance school show? Do I sell it with...
[00:11:42.340] - Taylor
A USB?
[00:11:43.200] - Gordon
A USB? But then a USB makes it into a file and it makes it very easy to pirate. So I will end up creating USBs, which I then distribute and then people have the opportunity of distributing those USBs or the files that are on them to other people. And that then cuts down the number of sales that I make and could get to a point when it's not actually going to be worth my while doing the project anymore. Or I'm going to have to start charging to do the filming, which then makes it more expensive for everybody. Do I go the streaming route? And if I go the streaming route, then I've got to stream it from somewhere. So I've got hosting costs, and again, it's access to the stream. How do I control that? How do I prevent people from sharing links with other people and just one person buys it and shares the link with ten other people? It's the problem that Netflix and Blockbuster had. Blockbuster didn't figure it out, which is why they went bankrupt. You mentioned Blockbuster earlier. Netflix did figure it out. They figured out this DRM system. But for someone like me, a small time video producer that maybe has, I don't know, maximum of 100 sales, DRM just isn't viable for me because there's a big cost involved in DRM. And once you start going down that route, you've got to have a whole system in place to manage it. You've got to make sure that people have to log in. And once they've logged in, only then do they have access, and you've got to stop more than one person logging in on one account. It gets to the point where it just is not viable. And I haven't come up with a solution to it yet. I have this dance school show that I'm filming and that's coming up on Sunday, so a couple of days time, and I'm going to continue with the DVDs for the time being. The number that I sell every year goes down, because less people have access to DVDs and it is going to be a problem I need to fix. But it's not a problem I have a solution for at the moment and I don't actually know how I'm going to get around this in the future. If you have any suggestions, or you know of ways that might work, then please leave a comment below because I'd be really interested to hear it.
[00:14:37.470] - Taylor
One idea is you see how many sales you get for one year maybe and try USB method and depending on how many sales you get, you then talk to the dance school for example, and say "look, this is what I would normally earn in a rough average because of people not buying because they're obviously sharing with each other. I'm going to need you to subsidize the cost of my time."
[00:15:11.660] - Gordon
But then that puts extra costs into people who've not been used to paying that and therefore I could lose the job, and that is the problem. Everywhere I turn there's extra costs involved. Even just getting USB sticks. A USB stick is going to cost me more than a blank DVD is going to cost me. And so the media itself is going to cost me more. So yeah, I don't have a solution. As I said, if you can think of anything, or you know of a solution from another area, then please leave a comment and I'd love to know about it.
[00:15:52.230] - Taylor
Yeah, I think the only way is for you to start charging for the videography and the editing like most people do, and then whatever you earn on top of that with the USBs is a bonus. That's the way I see it, because as much as it's unfair, or not unfair, but it's charging the people that are getting it filmed, at the end of the day, if they went anywhere else they would be charged. So you could look at it that way.
[00:16:25.740] - Gordon
It's a change of model though, isn't it?
[00:16:27.890] - Taylor
But at the same time, if they went anywhere else, I highly doubt, for this exact reason, that anyone else would do it for free and just take the income from the sales.
[00:16:37.190] - Gordon
Well, I do have a minimum number of DVD orders that I have to get, which covers my time. So I'm not doing it and hoping I'm going to make sales.
[00:16:46.450] - Taylor
No, I know that. But then what happens if you don't make it? Then what happens?
[00:16:51.330] - Gordon
They guarantee it. So the dance school, in this case, will guarantee I sell X number and if I don't then they'll pay for the extra ones.
[00:16:59.590] - Taylor
That's what I was saying is that you look at how many you sell with the USBs and they have to subsidize, whatever your minimum is. That's what I was kind of getting at in terms of them having to... So they still technically do subsidize.
[00:17:12.090] - Gordon
They've never needed to.
[00:17:13.600] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:14.170] - Gordon
But that is in place just in case. But it is a bigger extra cost for the dance school which they haven't had before, and that's not something I want to do unless I really have to. So for the time being I'm just going to plod along with DVDs and wait and see, 'til we get to a point when people just don't want DVDs, or just don't have DVD players anymore and then see what happens at that point.
[00:17:45.680] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:17:46.710] - Gordon
So that's it from me.
[00:17:48.180] - Taylor
That's it from me as well.
[00:17:49.730] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can like, share and subscribe. Please do so because we would like to grow the viewership of these vidcasts and podcasts and as always, you can leave a comment below.
[00:18:05.950] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and search for any topics we may have spoken about that you want to hear us talk about or you're interested in.
[00:18:18.270] - Gordon
And hopefully you are able to watch this and everything's coming through clearly. We are using a brand new laptop which I'm sure Taylor will talk about next week.
[00:18:28.710] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:28.710] - Gordon
And assuming this has all come out and you can hear what I'm saying, we'll see you next week. My name's Gordon. I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:18:38.320] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:18:41.230] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:18:41.820] - Taylor
Bye.
