What I learned working for a 🐭

For three years, back in the early 2000s, I worked for Disney.

(And before you ask, no, I didn’t spend any time dressed as a mouse or a duck.)

To be honest, it wasn’t very “showbiz”.

In fact, the closest I came to celebrity was when the guy who dubbed Tom Hanks into Portuguese sometimes popped down to use our coffee machine.

I worked in the Distribution department. Its job was to make as money as possible from the film and TV products that Disney owned.

So we might approach a Swedish TV channel and say: “You can have the exclusive Scandinavian rights to broadcast The Incredibles for three months but you also have to buy four seasons of Alias plus Timon and Pumbaa.”

And some of these deals were crazy complicated. For a start you had to make sure the deal you were creating didn’t clash with another deal someone else had made earlier.

But what I found most fascinating was that Disney looked at every product with a ten-year time frame. Each one had a target amount of revenue it was expected to earn over that time.

And if a product was under-performing, the sales teams simply bundled it into more deals.

That meant that even if a film made X millions at the box office, it would probably make several millions more over its 10-year lifetime because of all those other deals.

It’s the same principle (albeit on a smaller scale) with the digital assets like online courses you create to add value to your business.

You shouldn’t focus too much on how much money your course might earn on its first launch. Instead, think about what it could earn over its lifetime, which could be several years.

I’ve always said that a course isn’t a good way to make a quick buck. But it is a great way to build a more valuable business that’s less dependent on your time.

So don’t think of your course as just a course. Think of it as your digital nest egg, building value for the future.

See you soon,

Glen