The Chris Hanna Show

• Why outgrowing someone does not mean you grew and they did not, you just grew in different directions
• Client relationships that became real friendships and ended when the work ended
• Why Chris gets more energy from conversations with business owners, despite being introverted and getting nothing from networking rooms themselves
• Honest self assessment on being bad at maintaining connections that are not tied to what he is actively doing
• Thinking about your life as a movie, and realizing some people you cast as main characters were actually setting up a scene
• Why not everyone important to your past is entitled to a starring role in your future
• History as a reason to value a relationship, but not always a reason to continue one
• Applying the same lens to companies, including exits that felt personal at the time and look inevitable now

Most relationships do not end in an explosion. They fizzle because the circumstances changed. Nobody was the villain. You shared a chapter, and then life moved.

Think in seasons. People come in, people go, some surprise you and come back.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Chris Hanna used to think constant availability was what made him great at customer service. Texts at midnight, emails on weekends, calls taken mid-conversation. He carried the habit out of his corporate years and straight into his own business.

What he actually did was train people to expect access to him on their schedule.

This one is about building boundaries into a service business without feeling like you are letting clients down.

In this episode:

• Why immediate replies stop being generous and start being the baseline
• Ping ponging across WhatsApp, text, email, Instagram, and Messenger, and why funnelling clients into one channel is still an unsolved problem
• The guy at the hockey game taking business calls through the whole play, and what Chris saw in it
• Do Not Disturb on permanently, and not knowing what his own ringtone sounds like
• Protecting personal time, and the intention he and his wife set about phones when they go out
• The client who consumed his time at all hours on things outside the scope of the work, and what his wife said about it
• Why a video business does not need to be a 24/7 service
• What Chris says to anyone who would not work with him over response times

The line that carries it: people cannot respect boundaries you never established. And every exception you make teaches someone exactly what you will tolerate.

Responsiveness is a real skill. Permanent availability is a different thing entirely, and it ends in burnout with nothing left to give the clients who actually matter.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Dangerous question for any founder. If you started your company today, knowing everything you know now, would you build the same thing?

Chris Hanna did not set out to build All In Content. It happened by accident. He left a CEO role to launch Hire4Me, a business built on hiring for small businesses, because he had hired, led, and promoted hundreds of people across his career and kept hearing the same thing from owners: I need to hire; I do not know how.

To promote it, he batch-created a pile of video content and pumped it out. People started asking him to record them. He had never recorded anyone before, said yes anyway, and figured it out. Before long, he was making more from content than from hiring.

That is how the name showed up. Go all in on content.

In this episode:

• How early customers quietly shaped every service All In Content offers
• Why Hire4Me never worked, even though Chris was good at it
• The shared studio partnership that came before the studio, and the client feedback that led to building his own
• What he would do sooner if he started over, and why the studio tops that list
• Undercharging and over-delivering on volume in the early years
• The full service agency phase, chasing static, podcasts, social management, ads, email, and everything else, and how close it came to breaking him and the business
• The costing exercise he ran that morning: a two-hour, 20-video session actually consumes about 10 hours of work once you count uploads, editor instructions, captions, thumbnails, scheduling, and delivery
• Why that math changes what break-even has to look like
• Every business card he has ever collected, still kept, and the follow-up system he wishes he had built
• The videos he would love to re-record, and why learning on the job shows in the early work

The lines that land it: just because something makes money does not mean it belongs in your business. Sometimes growth is deleting a service, not adding one. And evolution means occasionally disappointing the version of you who built the first draft.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Chris Hanna left the corporate world for freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment. Then he did what every entrepreneur does. He built a business. Clients, responsibilities, expenses, a studio, and a brand tied directly to his own name.

Every so often, an uncomfortable question surfaces. Did he build freedom, or a nicer cage?

The freedom is real. Some days he does not start until noon. Some weeks run 80, 90, 100 hours. Other weeks are 20. He works when the energy is there instead of clocking into somebody else's 8:30 to 5.

But he has no boss, and every client creates an obligation. Which is where the line that anchors this episode comes from: he fired his boss and accidentally hired every client.

In this episode:

• What freedom of schedule, money, decisions, and bosses actually looks like day to day
• The studio as both asset and obligation, a year in, still not leveraged the way it needs to be
• Why recurring revenue can feel like stability and a trap at the same time
• Holding onto clients for the money when the values and communication were never aligned, and what it cost to finally move on
• Keeping an employee longer than you should, and the money, time, and energy it ties up that could go elsewhere
• Why freedom without systems is just a business that depends on you being there
• A heavy travel year (Vegas, BC, Halifax, England, Mexico) as the real test of whether the business can breathe without him
• Why pre-recording content in batches is what buys future freedom
• The difference between escaping your business and building one you never want to escape from

Chris does not regret leaving corporate for a second. Building someone else's dream was the right call to walk away from. But freedom, as he defines it now, is not doing nothing. It is choosing who he works with, what he builds, when he goes hard, and when he pulls back.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

A grab bag episode. Three things Chris Hanna has been chewing on that did not each need their own hour.

First, the one he had a conversation about yesterday: since launching All In Content, he has never once looked for a job, not on LinkedIn, not on Indeed, not even in what has been one of the hardest years he has had. Recruiters have reached out. Clients have offered him full-time roles. He has never taken the meeting.

Then the bigger one. Over 15,000 videos recorded, and Chris has been sitting with the realization that he would love to re-record a huge number of them.

In this episode:

• Why going back to work for someone else has never been on the table, and why the reason is not grit
• What he would build instead if All In Content disappeared tomorrow
• The early setup: a cell phone and a 40-dollar Amazon mic, sometimes a gimbal, eventually two phones and a GoPro
• Podcasts he produced in the first months of the studio before he had lighting and camera settings dialed in for each room.
• Debating whether to delete old videos of himself that make the studio look worse than it is
• Why he has never gone back to first year clients to offer a do-over, and why that is awkward
• Nobody's kitchen again: the compromises of shooting in homes and offices, the boardroom with ceilings so high the audio echoed through the mics, the street level shoot he did not yet have the software to clean up
• The site visit he did Monday before agreeing to work with a new client, and why he will not skip that step anymore
• Being honest that the studio is still nowhere near as used as it needs to be

The last piece is one nobody in the video space says out loud. Having more than one person on a shoot is partly optics. Clients are sometimes surprised when it is just Chris. But it also buys efficiency, because the 15 minutes of setup and 15 minutes of teardown he handles alone are time he could spend coaching the person on camera.

Lessons from someone still in the middle of learning them.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Early on, nobody could batch record content faster than Chris Hanna. So he sold it. 50 to 100 videos in a single session. He believed in it, he delivered it, and he did it consistently for about a year and a half.

He now thinks it was one of the biggest mistakes he made in the business.

This episode is Chris arguing against an offer he successfully sold to a lot of businesses, and walking through the math that finally forced him to cap it.

In this episode:

• Why other companies never offered those numbers, and the reason he missed it at the time
• Content going stale before it ever gets posted, and footage sitting unused when a business changes direction
• Clients running out of gas late in a session and delivering their weakest takes
• Chris hitting the same wall recording, producing, and editing his own content
• The actual editing math: ten videos a day means two full weeks of work on a hundred video order
• Everything the price never accounted for, from ideas through captions, thumbnails, reviews, and uploads
• Why introducing caps has been genuinely hard to sell
• Returning clients who remember the old volume and the old price, and cannot reconcile paying more for less
• What better gear, a studio, and a real editing process changed about the output
• The current standard: a two hour session producing 20 to 25 fully edited videos
• The monthly retainer client where they shot only eight videos in two hours on purpose, and why that was the better call

Chris is not pretending the old sessions were worthless. He is saying that volume was the wrong thing to optimize for, and quality is what actually moves the needle.

Caps cost him bookings. He is keeping them anyway.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Chris Hanna opens this one cold: a beautiful video that does not explain who you are, what you do, or why you do it is a waste of money.

The word cinematic keeps showing up in consultations and proposal requests. Cinematic website intros. Cinematic social. Cinematic webinar content. Chris thinks most businesses asking for it are about to overpay for something that will not move a single deal.

Then there is the other side of the same problem. Trends. Three second boomerangs, dancing staff, and the same format Chris watched run back to back to back on Instagram, every industry using the exact same audio.

In this episode:

• Why high production can feel empty while a phone recording lands
• Chris admitting he has been guilty of chasing the polished version himself and watching the simpler one outperform it
• The team teaser video he saw and the money he suspects it cost, for almost no views and no message
• Real estate as the clearest local example: gorgeous drone footage that never mentions the neighbourhood, the property, or what living there is actually like
• A former client now doing content in house, pulling views into the millions, with business flat
• Why views do not mean anything unless they turn into calls, emails, DMs, and booked consultations
• Education, entertainment, and the edutainment middle ground worth thinking about
• Whether this is the TikTok effect, or businesses hiring young and outsourcing their voice to whoever knows the trends

The measurement problem sits underneath all of it. Most businesses are tracking the number that feels good instead of the one that pays.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Networking built a big part of Chris Hanna's business. Content at scale so people knew him before they met him, then rooms where those people finally shook his hand. It worked for years.

This year it stopped. And the reason is not the one most people would guess.

When Chris was unknown, every event meant brand new conversations at scale. Consultations booked, deals done. As he became known through partnerships and events, those new conversations turned into catch-ups with the same people. He admits he does it too, gravitating toward whoever he is comfortable with the moment he walks in.

In this episode:

• The twofold strategy that worked for years, and why it needs both halves
• Why being unknown was an advantage in a room
• The moment he started leaving events frustrated without knowing why
• How the quality of local rooms has shifted with more side hustlers and students showing up
• Why he sticks with the Windsor-Essex Chamber of Commerce and the Leamington Chamber
• Being mad at the socializing, not at the people
• Every event is the same restaurant, golf course, or winery, and why the local format needs to evolve
• The paid event he turned down because the ROI was not there, and the fellow business owner who agreed
• The suggestion someone made about running his own training events out of the studio instead

Chris does not have the fix. He knows the approach has to become more strategic, and the old version is done.

If you are going to rooms and coming out with nothing, this one will sound familiar.

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

Chris Hanna is talking money in this one. Specifically, the people who owe him and have decided not to pay.

The studio has a simple setup. 250 dollars, 90 minutes, walk out with raw footage. Book and prepay through the website. Clean process. Then Chris broke it for people he knew, people he figured were good for it, and let them pay after the session instead. Some paid part. Some paid nothing. Some he is still chasing.

Then the bigger version of the same mistake. Thousands of dollars' worth of work delivered before final payment to companies and people with genuinely great reputations in the community who stopped responding.

In this episode:

• Why the low-ticket work causes more stress than the high-ticket work
• What happens when you extend trust to someone you know instead of running your process
• One client who promised payment months ago, went quiet, and is now spending money to build the same capability internally.
• The cash flow hit when you have already paid a subcontractor for work you were never paid for
• What his studio landlord said that reframed the whole thing: they are not withholding their money, they are holding yours
• Sitting in a networking room hearing people praise someone who is stiffing you, and why he will not throw them under the bus.
• Thewrite-offf question he still has not answered
• What the process looks like from now on, with no exceptions

Chris is clear about where the blame sits. The people who did not pay made their choice. But he broke his own rule to let them.

New policy, said plainly: you want something done, you pay. No payment, no delivery.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca

For years Chris Hanna had a rule. Every time leads dipped, he could trace it back to a dip in his posting. Slow down for two or three months, and the next two or three months would be quiet. Post more, and the business came back.

This year he tested that rule harder than he ever has. Three to four posts a day across every channel. Thirty to fifty pieces a week. And the leads did not come.

This episode is Chris troubleshooting his own business in public, without a tidy answer at the end.

In this episode:

• The two channels that built the business: posting daily and showing up in person, with speaking layered on top
• Why he scaled back networking, and what changed in the rooms he used to get value from
• What a heavy travel year did to his thinking about consistency
• The possibilities he is weighing: algorithm shifts, more competition, and a race to the bottom on price locally
• Website companies now selling video, and what that says about the market
• Why the same advice is still working for his clients but not for him right now
• The 80 percent conversion tactic that stopped converting, and what he thinks changed
• Why ads are not his lane, and why he refuses to hand outreach to a vendor
• Two months of DMs and cold emails he hated doing, and what came of it

The honest split Chris lands on: either the rule expired, or posting was never the real mechanism and it was just correlated with something else he was doing back then. He does not know which yet.

He is building a new approach and has already worked out how he will measure it. Not sharing it yet.

If what used to work in your business has quietly stopped working, this one is for you.

Links

All In Content: https://allincontent.ca
All In Content Studio: https://studio.allincontent.ca
Chris Hanna: https://chrishanna.ca

Want your video, social media and podcast handled so you stay visible without doing it yourself? Book a call with Chris: https://calendly.com/chris-hanna/all-in-content-consultation

More from Chris: https://chrishanna.ca