Photo by: Cindy Roberts Gravitt

Learn. Grow. Meet new friends. Explore. Experience. Change your life – forever!

There are no schools for what we do – there is no nationally governed certification.  Most of us never went to business school or film school, yet we run filmmaking businesses!  Despite how good we are, we should always shoot for how good we could be, and that can only be done through challenging ourselves by consistently being around other filmmakers and businesspeople, both locally & nationally.

So first, google your local city + “professional videographer’s association.”  Living in New Hampshire, I don’t have a PVA up here in the mountains, so I travel to the group that meets in Boston. If you are within a couple hours drive of a city with a PVA, it is worth your time to make the trip.

Beyond Video

Your video business, by name alone, is half ‘business.’  Realistically, it’s mostly business!  So if you don’t have a PVA anywhere near you, there are still business networking groups that meet in or near any city in the country.  Within these groups, you can learn the business of running a business from a diverse group of business owners.  Nevermind that they don’t shoot video, they still know about customer service, accounting, marketing, social networking, legal issues, and many more disciplines that will be relevant to you running your video business.

You may find a free local networking association, but you could also pay a nominal fee to be a part of a more structured group under BNI. Check out their website to see if there’s a chapter near you.

Meetups

You may or may not have a PVA and you may or may not have a BNI, and you’re just looking to “meet up” with anyone who might have a shared interest with you.  Let’s say you want to learn more about Wordpress, or Adobe Photoshop, or Quickbooks.  With Meetup.com, you can find out if people are getting together in your area to explore how to better use these tools.  There’s a meetup for just about anything, and most are free!  And if there isn’t one going on in your area, setup the meetup yourself and discover new friends with whom you can discover and learn.

Conventions

“I’m so nervous! I’ve never been to a “convention” before. Who will I meet? Wait, I don’t use a glide cam, so will I not have anything to talk about? I hope they don’t remember it was me who posted that silly question on the forum!” – this could be your quote.

At the highest level of education and networking, enter the ‘national convention.’  With all the pros in one place, they may be intimidating to attend, but really, there’s nothing to fear.

First of all, everyone is in this together. You can see from the talent on this blog that loads of filmmakers are genuinely enthusiastic about helping others grow and succeed. You have to start somewhere and that first big step can be booking yourself a spot at IN[FOCUS] 2011 (registration begins August 16th, 2010) .

I can assure you that getting out of the taxi and walking into register may be knee quaking and heart pounding, but those symptoms will only last for a second until someone greets you and you realize, (deep breath) these are totally normal and real people! “Oh look, it’s so and so from twitter!”

Unlike BNI, PVA’s, and meetups, national conventions have one time attendance fees which may seem daunting, but affording a national convention is well within your grasp.

How to save for IN[FOCUS] 2011:

Say you need to save (and I’m taking a ball park price, this was about what I spent last year) $1500 for your plane ticket, event registration, room rate, food and misc social expenses.

$1500 / 12 months = $166 a month or $4.11 a day

How many days a week do you go out for coffee or lunch? I want you to think hard the next time you pull up to the drive through to spend $4.25 on a latte, or $8.50 on a mediocre panini.  Can you make your lunch at home? Brew coffee at work? Do you drink a lot of soda? How about switching to water a few days a week and saving your soda money? There are many ways to make it happen, you just have to get creative. Maybe you forgo holiday gifts with your spouse or family if they know how much going to the convention will mean to you. Hopefully, family would be thrilled to know they are contributing to your business by helping you save for IN[FOCUS] 2011.

I think continuing education is so important for all of us. If you were a doctor, a teacher, a real estate professional, there are mandatory license laws that require “x” amount of hours per year. We don’t really have anything like that governing this profession, so that’s why I think it’s great to set personal goals and make yourself attend some form of CE classes each year. The value is not just the platform presentations – it’s the down-time eating group meals, chatting about the biz and  building relationships so that you can call on people when you are back home in your lonely office.

If you haven’t ever been to a conference, this form of Continuing Education will be milemarker in your business life where you will genuinely look back and say “that was pivotal for me personally and for launching my business forward, and I can’t even imagine where I would be if I never attended!”

Meg