How do you plan your time for planning and filming videos for your main channel while balancing your agency, coaching, and content creation? I'm struggling to manage content output, client work, and scaling my coaching business. Could you share your planning and balancing approach?
I’m hitting the upper limits of what one person can realistically handle with my current level of systematization. I keep seeing situations where a better way would exist, but I don’t have time to figure it out, so I push through at a less effective level. I ran into the same issue with my agency—I know there must be more leveraged ways to do the same work without hiring another team member. Pragmatically, I’m at about $2 million a year in profit, which feels like a reasonable ceiling for someone trying to juggle an agency model (which is less profitable per unit time), a main YouTube channel, and other content‑production mechanisms. Even with good time management, that seems to be the upper limit for one person. To give you a behind‑the‑scenes look: I usually start with the video idea, then the title and thumbnail, because those drive performance. I source ideas from YouTube comments using a comment scraper, turn them into titles via templates, then think about a thumbnail (though I don’t over‑think it—content matters more). I’ll sometimes leave a silly clip at the end, but I focus mainly on production. Logistically, I get the ideas into the pipeline, then filming is straightforward: I turn on the camera and talk for an hour or two, sometimes following a strict outline, other times just using my tablet and pen because it’s more time‑efficient.
Well, I wouldn't be in your situation in the first place. It doesn't make sense to start a YouTube channel or talk about stuff until you've actually delivered value in the past. If your revenue is less than $20,000 a month, you shouldn't be running this channel right now because lead volume will be too variable and there's nothing to build a business around. Spending time just touching up your content and trying to make it really high quality completely defeats the purpose—believe it or not, your content doesn't have to be very high quality as long as you're somebody worth listening to. For example, I'm just in my room in a tank top after a shower; I might not know what I'm talking about when I started this video, but it's still worth listening to because I've achieved outcomes that a lot of people here want to achieve, and I've consolidated a lot of knowledge. The two are valuable together, but the actual quality of the content aside from that knowledge and the perceived value of being associated with me isn't anywhere near as high. So the hack is: you need to do good first. Don't start a content business and then run another business side by side. Start the other business, crush it, achieve massive success, and then make videos talking about it. If you do anything else, you're really just putting the carpet before the horse and wasting your time.
My personal brand now drives the vast majority of new conversations, opportunities, and clients for my agency; I couldn't run the agency at its current level without it. Initially, I did everything outbound—door-to-door—then moved to less intense but scalable outreach like cold calling, cold emailing, and cold DMs. Three to four months into my YouTube channel, I was making $40k–$50k a month from cold outbound with my agency. I started the YouTube channel to scale my agency, and shortly after, I landed a $20k deal without a single sales call, realizing I could use my subscriber base as a main lever for client acquisition. Many people try to skip the outreach step, thinking they can just start a YouTube channel and get clients from it. However, building a successful YouTube funnel is very difficult and risky; it often takes years of consistent content with no return. Moreover, if you lack outreach, sales, and marketing skills, you can't reliably turn strangers into paying customers. If your YouTube channel disappears or platform changes, you're left without a fallback. Therefore, I recommend not skipping the outreach step: first build a business using traditional outreach, marketing, and sales skills. Content is important, but the internet is full of people who only talk without doing. In my own agency, I no longer manage most projects myself; I have a consultant/account manager (Cody) and a backend/team manager (Geo) handling projects, while I act in an advisory capacity, especially for large enterprise deals like Mr. Beast that require many meetings. In short, you should spend your time and energy building skills that turn total strangers into paying customers. Once you've validated that ability—maybe earning $10k–$30k a month with your agency—you can then invest in more scalable outreach methods like your brand, Twitter, or YouTube channel.
The best offer to pitch a YouTuber is probably ideation. I say that as somebody who has struggled with ideation. Everything on YouTube now starts with the packaging — the title and the thumbnail. That's just how the game works. People typically come up with titles and thumbnails before they even come up with the video. If you have some trending story that helps, but often evergreen channels will try to find the most insane moment or concept or idea to use in a thumbnail and then build their whole video stack around that. Sounds crazy, but it's true. So if you can help solve the bottleneck of ideation for somebody, they are typically able and willing to pay you a lot of money. I'm solving the bottleneck of ideation for myself and I've basically seen everything in my media business get alleviated as a result. The reality is people usually have more production capacity than they have ideas. So if you go all the way up the funnel and solve the very first step in the big pipeline, you'll usually do far better. I would sell them some sort of ideation system.
The reason I can make really long videos is that I use the software in my day‑to‑day work long enough to know it thoroughly, then I just record a video on it—no extra learning time needed. For example, I recorded a 6.5‑hour Claude Code marketing course and published it without spending a second learning for it; every build I showed was from client work over the past year. This lets me turn on the camera and start talking immediately. It’s not the highest quality content per minute, but it unlocks much higher volume, letting me make videos on topics I’m already good at. The secret to high‑volume, high‑growth content creation is to make a lot of content, but you can’t do that if you have to research and pre‑produce an hour every day for a 10‑minute video. So, make content only on stuff you’re really good at, which requires you to become exceptional in that field first—this makes you interesting. In short, don’t make videos all day unless you have something worthwhile to film about; when you do, you’ll be good enough at it that you won’t need much pre‑production and can be more natural.