7 Must-Track Metrics That Will Make You More Money In 2025

332. The 7 most important metrics to track

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[00:00:00] Brian: In this episode, we're going to go through the seven must track metrics that if you actually track these, you willYou'll make more money.

[00:00:04] Brian: Surprise. it sounds like a bold claim, but this is something that I get really excited about because I love metrics. I love analytics. I love data. I love all these nerdy things, which is why I have this podcast and why most freelancers don't have a podcast about business because most freelancers don't give a shit about metrics and data and analytics and spreadsheets.

[00:00:22] Brian: But there's a quote, it's an old quote that goes back. I think Peter Drucker said this, what gets measured gets managed. And to put that in human terms that everyone can understand is it is infinitely. easier to affect change in something if we are actually tracking it. If you were wanting to actually lose weight, just weigh yourself every day.

[00:00:38] Brian: there's a lot of just mental junk up there that keeps you from doing that. Just like there's a lot of mental junk up there that keep people from tracking their finances because they don't want to know how bad it's going. can tell you, I can look you straight in the eye, and I can confidently say, if you weigh yourself every day, it's easier to manage your weight.

[00:00:52] Brian: If you track your finances every day, it's easier to save money Make sure that the money's going where it should, And just like those two things, if you track [00:01:00] these seven metrics in your business, it is easier to affect your finances. Change on these metrics and if you can positively influence these metrics in your business, It is absolutely impossible Not to make more money and it starts with tracking Most freelancers just ignore this most basic fundamental thing of tracking metrics

[00:01:18] Brian: So you end up living your life only seeing what's called lagging indicators These are the things that you're Are the result of all the leading indicators the things we actually want to start tracking So when you look at your bank account and it's dwindling or to zero or below zero You're in massive debt and going deeper into debt every month That is actually a result of some of these seven metrics that we're going to talk about today Not being in alignment not being good.

[00:01:41] Brian: So when you see your bank account dwindling and you wait to the last minute to fix that, it is likely too late because those low numbers in your bank account that you're experiencing right now in your business or in your personal life, it's a direct result of what you did weeks or months, or sometimes even a year plus ago, In your business,

[00:01:59] Brian: or in other [00:02:00] cases, it's things that you didn't do weeks, months, or even a year plus ago in your business.

[00:02:05] Brian: So this episode, we're going to dive into the seven must track metrics that if you actually track these and we can start to make influences on these things that we're tracking, we'll work on actually improving these things. and the rest of 2024 into 2025,

[00:02:16] Brian: you will make more money. And at a bare minimum, you should be tracking these things on a monthly basis. Again, I'll give you the seven you need to be tracking. But I just looked into my own business and I was just curious, like how many metrics do I track?

[00:02:25] Brian: How often do I track them? There are 31 metrics in my business that I track Daily. There's also other metrics that my team reports to me on that I don't, personally track, but they're responsible for bringing to me. But that's still 31 that I personally track and keep up to date daily, but I didn't start there.

[00:02:41] Brian: please God, don't go off and just make a spreadsheet of 31 different data points that you're trying to track. You won't know what to do with all of them, but these are the seven big ones. And these seven big ones are on my daily tracking spreadsheet for my business metrics as well.

[00:02:51] Brian: If you do this, this is going to bring so much clarity in your business. You're going to see exactly what the weak points are. The parts that you really need to put your focus, time, effort, energy on to [00:03:00] fix, because you can't lie to yourself. These are just numbers. The numbers don't have an opinion. The numbers do not have feelings.

[00:03:05] Brian: The numbers do not care about your feelings. The numbers really don't care about your opinions. The numbers are just telling you how it is. And if you can just accept that and know that they're there to help you, This can be so much better for you over the next year.

[00:03:17] Brian: And one of the coolest parts of this is you can actually start predicting your income. One of the most terrifying things as a freelancer, especially once you step into this full time you have a family and you have people that rely on you, this can get really terrifying. And the reason that's terrifying is because there's just an inherent lack of predictability in what you're going to get paid, So if you have a day job, I'm getting paid this much every month, more or less. Maybe there's bonuses involved or something, but generally speaking, I'm getting paid this much, But as a freelancer or any business owner, that predictability is basically gone, except if you really track your metrics well, you do it diligently, you can start to really project what you're going to earn over the next month, three months, six months, even a year in advance.

[00:03:56] Brian: And just as an example, last month over a month ago, I was [00:04:00] 690 off of my projected revenue. I was actually 690 over my projected revenue. So I was 6 percent off of my projected revenue, 0.

[00:04:09] Brian: 6%, 1%, for something that I was going to earn 30 days from now.

[00:04:12] Brian: and I'm also on pace for the projected revenue I had for the whole year. And when you can do this, there's this peace of mind. it's not just me and my family. I have seven other full time people and they have kids and they have families that they depend on them for.

[00:04:24] Brian: so I am now responsible for many lives, But I wouldn't have the peace of mind that I have right now. And the confidence that I have right now, if I didn't track these metrics on a daily basis,

[00:04:31] Brian: or at the very least for some of you. Who are not at the place yet where you have that level of stability and predictability because some of these numbers that we're gonna be tracking are really bad right now, you're gonna at least have what we call the canary in the coal mine back in the old days.

[00:04:42] Brian: I think a lot of coal mines are out now. I think the UK actually just phased out of using coal for electricity this year. read something about that in Morning Brew recently. But anyways, they would bring canaries down to the coal mines and canaries are really sensitive to carbon monoxide.

[00:04:55] Brian: so they alert the coal miners before carbon monoxide built up to the [00:05:00] point where it killed people. they're essentially the early warning system. these seven metrics, if you track them, these are your early warning systems that if something is looking bad, you have time to fix them before they kill your business.

[00:05:10] Brian: So you can start to see, Why I'm so excited about these seven metrics and shout out, by the way, to Josh Maitland. He actually emailed me like yesterday. It was like, Hey dude have you ever done an episode on metrics? It'd be cool to see like the top six business metrics you should be tracking. And so literally I was like, what metrics would I track?

[00:05:24] Brian: If I were just to sit down and talk through this. And so this episode comes from you, Josh. So thanks for that. I came up with seven, not six. So apologies for not getting the exact number you wanted, but I feel like you'll be happy with at least these seven here. Plus I have a bonus one in here as well.

[00:05:36] Brian: So if you've never listened to this podcast before, hello, I'm Brian. This is the six figure creative podcast. This is for creative freelancers who offer freelance services, who want to make more money from their freelance services without selling their soul. That sounds like you. This is a podcast for you.

[00:05:48] Brian: And this is a really good episode for you I cannot think of a less soul selling way of making more money because you're not hurting anyone. You're not taking of anyone. You're not taking on projects that you don't want to take on. You're literally just tracking numbers so that you can [00:06:00] better understand yourself and your business.

[00:06:02] Brian: And there comes a time where if you want to have a business with the revenue goals that you have and you want to be big boy or big girl business, you got to do big boy or big girl things in your business. You got to get out of your diapers, right? And any of you have had day jobs or have worked at big agencies doing creative work, all of these businesses and all of these agencies likely track these seven metrics at a bare minimum.

[00:06:21] Brian: These are all things that every business at a higher level does. And so we can take some of these things. We don't have to track 31 daily metrics. like your podcast host, Brian, who's obsessed about this stuff. You just check these seven on a monthly basis and you will be better off for it.

[00:06:34] Brian: Now. I really recommend that Updating some of these on a weekly basis, once you understand the seven we're doing here you'll have a better grasp on how these will fit in and when it makes sense to update these things. But these are the seven. And I've broken this into two kind of categories.

[00:06:46] Brian: First is client acquisition metrics. This is what we talk about a ton on the podcast because this is what a lot of freelancers suck at and struggle with. And so I want to talk about these first. And then there is the fulfillment metrics. When you get a client and you're working with a client, what are the metrics we track within our [00:07:00] clients and our projects?

[00:07:01] Brian: two different categories of metrics. Both are very important. But

[00:07:04] Brian: first we're going to go into the client acquisition metrics. I've got four here to talk through with a bonus one and some other caveats and things to talk about how you actually use these metrics because it's one thing to track things. It's another thing to know how to actually use these metrics to better your business.

[00:07:17] Brian: So the first metric is tracking something we call marketing leads. I'll explain what those are, but this is essentially the seeds of your business. If you think about a garden, these are planting seeds, right? So when you're talking about marketing leads, this is like the earliest sign that you might get a client.

[00:07:31] Brian: you can call these a bunch of different things, but like, these are people that are low intent. Maybe they downloaded a lead magnet you had, maybe they signed up for your newsletter. If you have one, maybe they signed up for that first step in your two step opt in process that we teach here.

[00:07:42] Brian: If someone wants to sign up for an inquiry or fill out your pre call questionnaire or your quote request form or whatever you have, you do a two step. That's where they fill their name and email in first, and then you capture the lead. That's a marketing lead. and then they put All details about the project and their needs in the pre call questionnaire or the court request form.

[00:07:58] Brian: That's step two. That's [00:08:00] something else. That's a sales lead. That's next. But the first one is that step one lead. so the differentiation here is marketing leads are a lot lower quality. You're going to convert a lot less of those to clients, but this is a wonderful asset to have because it builds something called a mailing list, an email list.

[00:08:14] Brian: Many freelancers, the ones that I work with and that I know this is a very valuable resource that they have. And it's one of our most valuable resources that we have over 50, 000 people actively on our email list right now. I think total like 100, 150, 000 throughout the lifetime that I've been doing email marketing in my life.

[00:08:28] Brian: Obviously people unsubscribe or you clean your list over time for people that aren't opening emails anymore to be able to access 50, 000 people. And a moment's notice is a wonderful thing. And those are all what we call marketing leads.

[00:08:39] Brian: And this is what most freelancers suck at. If you're listening, especially for the first time, you likely don't have any sort of lead magnet yet. We have a whole lead generation series to go back to on the podcast.

[00:08:47] Brian: You may not have a two step, quote request process or opt in process when it comes to inquiry forms, right? Where that first step is capturing the lead.

[00:08:55] Brian: You like, you don't have a newsletter or anything that's actually bringing in people to actually sign up for these things. So this is one of [00:09:00] the biggest areas for improvement that most freelancers struggle with. And I highly encourage you go back to our lead generation series. You can get to by going to six figure creative.

[00:09:07] Brian: com slash. We talked through the secret to consistent clients. That was the first part of a, like, I think afour part lead generation series So great place to start. Ifthis is a number, you know,is like a zero is a goose egg every month. that's the first of these four client acquisition metrics.

[00:09:22] Brian: the second client acquisition metric is sales leads. I kind of hinted at this before, but a sales lead is somebody who has directly expressed interest in hiring you. They have said, Brian, how much do you cost? Brian, are you available next month for X, Y, or Z? Brian, can I fill out your quote request form?

[00:09:38] Brian: Brian, can we jump on a call to talk to this project? Whatever sort of likeprocess you have for sales, I highly encourage people to follow our process, which is a pre call questionnaire. Following that two step opt in process where you capture the lead first, aka a marketing lead. On the second page, you capture all their information for a full contact form.

[00:09:54] Brian: So an inquiry form, if you have a multi step form for a lot of questions, or you have a simple form, it's just like, tell me about your project, what are [00:10:00] your needs, what dates do you want? These simple things. then they book a call to have a discussion with you.

[00:10:04] Brian: That's the process that we encourage people to follow. And that most of our clients follow in their own businesses. But as soon as someone fills out that inquiry form or that pre call questionnaire, or they book a call with you, or even in some cases, just DMing you on social media saying, Hey, Brian, how much would it be for this?

[00:10:18] Brian: These are all people that have directly expressed interest in hiring you. text from friend, even, or text from an old client, these are sales leads. And these are a second big metric to track. If someone has expressed interest in paying you money, a repeat customer. A referral,

[00:10:32] Brian: a complete stranger, whatever they are, they found you through social media. They found you through ads. They found you through content, whatever. If they express direct interest in hiring you, they are now a sales lead and you update that every month. How many marketing leads did I get? How many sales leads did I get?

[00:10:45] Brian: if marketing leads are seeds that you're planted, they These sales leads are plants that have grown from those seeds.

[00:10:51] Brian: And that leads us to the third obvious metric here, which is clients are next. That's the fruit from these trees that we've planted with these seeds in our business. [00:11:00] Right?So we've got seeds, plants, fruit. The natural progression, same with marketing leads into sales leads into clients.

[00:11:06] Brian: So when you close a client, track how many clients you get each month. Those are three very basic, fundamental things that you need to track every month in order to make more money.

[00:11:15] Brian: And there's a fourth metric here that's as important as the other metrics, because you can get five, 10 new clients a month, but if they're all paying you 10, that's not a very good business. A hundred dollars a month, 50 to a hundred bucks. No, that's terrible. Right? So what do we need to track? It is a metric that we call our AACV, our average annual client value. Why do we say this? Not just say,What's our average client worth? There's too many different ways to track that. There's something called LTV. How much is the client worth throughout the lifetime of them?

[00:11:43] Brian: That's almost impossible for freelancers to track accurately with any level of confidence because how many times does the client come back? They come back one, three, six times. It just gets really complicated and I don't like trying to teach that to people, but also for especially for project based freelancers, how much is one project [00:12:00] worth?

[00:12:00] Brian: When did they come back to you again? They could go back to you six months, eight months, nine months. 16 months. They may come back to you multiple times in a year to do multiple projects. So that's why we track what we call average annual client value. That is how much is one client worth to us over a 12 month span.

[00:12:13] Brian: And the easiest way to track this metric is to just look at last year's income and divided by last year's total clients. so if you made a hundred thousand dollars just for easy round numbers, and you worked with a hundred different clients, which is a lot of clients, that means the average annual client value is 1, 000.

[00:12:28] Brian: If you work with 10 clients for a hundred thousand dollars, that would be 10, 000 average annual client value. You can also look at the same over the last trailing 12 months, where you look at the last 12 months, how much money did I make last 12 months? How many clients did I work with? It's a little less accurate that way, but it's still fine.

[00:12:42] Brian: So those are the four client acquisition metrics that we look at. And the reason those are the four most important metrics is because if you look at each of those four steps or those four elements as the fundamental building blocks of a client, you can start to look at how we can affect change in that. if you look at the conversion rates between each of those steps, we can start to [00:13:00] see how we can affect our business.

[00:13:01] Brian: So when we see how many marketing leads turn into a sales lead, how many sales leads turn into a client, what percentage. And we'd multiply that client base. By our average annual client value, you can start to do some fun things.

[00:13:13] Brian: You can start to predict revenue. You can start to say, I know that I got a hundred new marketing leads this month. And I know that that's going to turn into 10 sales leads over the next 30 days, 60 days. And those 10 sales leads are going to turn into three clients. And those three clients are going to be worth 5, 000 each over the next 12 months.

[00:13:30] Brian: So I know that this month. I generated about 15, 000 for the year. that might've meant that I only made 5, 000 this month, but I know that this year I generated 15, 000 in new revenue, there's a difference between revenue and cash collected. Revenue is how much did I generate? Potential revenue for the entire year.

[00:13:47] Brian: And then how much cash did actually collect for this month,

[00:13:50] Brian: but let me give you some benchmarks to follow here. There is the marketing lead to sales leads conversion rate. And that means if you have a lead magnet, how many of those people that download a lead magnet actually book a sales call with you? What [00:14:00] percentage of that do you shoot for? Everyone's business is different, but I've seen as low as 5 percent in a healthy workable business, 5 percent of those.

[00:14:07] Brian: to 32%. these are businesses that are actually generating good amount of leads every month, marketing leads and sales leads. If you are a business that you generate five inquiries a month, and all five of those were also marketing leads. So you have a hundred percent conversion rate.

[00:14:20] Brian: It's not a very healthy business. not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about people who consistently generate marketing leads every month, consistently generate sales leads every month. They tend to fall between that five and 30 percent conversion rate for that step from marketing to sales leads.

[00:14:33] Brian: And why such a big gap here? It's because of the difference in models. Some people are really heavily building an email list with email marketing. So they're getting generally lower quality leads. So they're going to have less conversion rate there, but they can get them at a very high volume. So if you can generate 500 new leads a month to your email list,

[00:14:51] Brian: and only 5 of those become inquiries or sales leads, that's still 25. That's really good, On the flip side, if you were doing more Direct offer [00:15:00] focused things like if you listen to a few episodes ago, where I talked about what's working now in client acquisition, where you're directly offering your services, really the only marketing leads you're generating are people that are filling out the first step in your application, that two step process that I talked about earlier.

[00:15:12] Brian: In those cases, you're gonna have 30, 50 percent even or more of people that are marketing leads turning into sales leads. So that's why there's a difference here. It just depends on what your client acquisition model is. So if you're going a lead generation model route, shoot for that five to 10 percent rate.

[00:15:25] Brian: If you are doing direct offer route, you want to be at that 20 to 30 percent rate between marketing leads and sales leads. Hopefully there's some good benchmarks for you. this is getting into the weeds here for my more advanced people, but I'm hopefully this is, valuable to hear the benchmarks for this sort of stuff.

[00:15:37] Brian: Next, we look at the sales lead to client conversion rate. So if the people who inquired about your services or filled out your pre call form or booked a call with you, whatever you want to consider a sales lead here, what percentage of those should become clients? And this is another really wide range here.

[00:15:50] Brian: I'm going to talk through why that is and what you should shoot for yourself. I've seen as low as 10 percent work in businesses. Which sounds really low, but I've also seen as high as 90%, which is [00:16:00] really high. funny enough, the business at 10 percent was making more money and was healthier than the businesses I've seen at 90%.

[00:16:06] Brian: Why is that? It's because if 90 percent of your sales leads, it's a really bad sign. We actually have an episode on this on why a high sales conversion rate is actually a bad thing in your business. And this goes out to all my freelancers out there who brag about, Oh, I close every deal that I get. Every inquiry that comes in or every referral I get, I close 90 percent plus.

[00:16:23] Brian: Go back to episode 224. Why your high sales conversion rate is actually a bad thing. Episode 224. You can get there by going to six figure creative. com slash two, two, four. I'll give you the quick rundown of that. Just so in case you're curious, I'm not leaving you on a cliffhanger here. It's because if you're closing 90 percent of your leads.

[00:16:39] Brian: It generally means you're not getting many leads. You're getting what we're called like lay down leads. People who are just, they're going to close no matter what, right? the hottest of hot leads. And if you are closing that many leads, it means you're leaving a ton of money on the table you should be getting rejected one out of every two times.

[00:16:53] Brian: If you're not getting rejected once out of every two calls, at least below that, we'll talk about sales issues that you might have, but if you're not [00:17:00] getting rejected Half of your leads that means that you're either not generating enough leads or you're not charging enough or both in many cases So I tell everyone if you just need a good range to shoot for go for that 30 to 50 percent your calls That you close or clients that you close So if every 10 inquiries that come in you close three or five of those that's a good healthy ratio there If you're not being rejected at all, horrible sign Again, it either means you are utterly neglecting this front piece, the seeds planted and the trees grown, And also leaving money on the table as far as what you're charging clients. And that generally means you're not raising rates because you're scared to raise rates because you need every project that comes in.

[00:17:33] Brian: And because Every project that comes in represents a lifeline that's summoned through to you because you're waiting around for clients to magically find you through hope marketing and so you have to close everything and so you can't raise your rates because you're scared you'll scare away clients, So think about the side where you have that, client with a 10 percent sales lead to client close rate, right? It doesn't mean they closed. 10 percent of their sales calls. That meant that they were getting so many book calls sales leads that they were being very picky cherry picking the leads that they actually wanted to talk [00:18:00] to, Which ones were a better fit for their business? And then they're only getting on the phone with 20, 30 percent of those. And they're closing 20, 30 percent of those. At a really high average annual client value and they're making very good money.

[00:18:10] Brian: That's a healthy business where you can cherry pick and you can be selective and you can be confident in your rates because you know you have plenty of leads in the pipeline. If this one says no, think about how much healthier of a business that is. So that's why in that specific case, the low sales lead to client conversion rate is actually very good thing.

[00:18:26] Brian: Because they're weeding out so many people before they ever get on the phone with them. So those are the four core client acquisition metrics. If you track all four of these and start making changes to improve all four of these. We have episodes in our backlog. There's over 330 episodes now in this podcast.

[00:18:39] Brian: There is an episode for every one of these four metrics. For marketing leads, there's the whole lead generation series. For sales leads, we've got plenty of sales related episodes on the podcast. Increasing average annual client value.

[00:18:50] Brian: There's episodes on that as well. A good series to go to

[00:18:53] Brian: for increasing average annual client value would be episode 300 through 303 is a four part series. called [00:19:00] how to set yourself apart from the other 500 million freelancers in the world. What a title. It was part one, two, three, four. Go listen to that. literally that episode is a whole series on differentiation, how you can set yourself apart, how you can differentiate yourself from everyone else.

[00:19:13] Brian: And one of the biggest things that can affect your prices is how commoditized you are. Can I just go find another person offering your exact services at the exact same quality for less? Bye. Especially overseas, right? I'm a business owner, right? also hire freelancers to do some of the things in my business that I need to be done, right?

[00:19:27] Brian: So I understand hiring people that are just offering a button seat service. If you're a button seat freelancer, you're going to always be pushed down on price. Until you have differentiated yourself in some number of ways. So go listen to that series if you struggle with that and that'll help you increase average annual client value here.

[00:19:41] Brian: So those are the four metrics to talk over against marketing leads. These are the seeds of your business sales leads. These are the plants that grow from those seeds clients. That's the fruit that sprouts from those trees, right? Average annual client value. I don't have an analogy for that. Someone else can give me a good analogy for that, but it just means how much is each client worth throughout the year for you.

[00:19:57] Brian: It's really easy if you're like a wedding photographer and one [00:20:00] client's worth one project for you, they're not coming back to you four times a year. And it can be harder if you're like a family photographer. it can be harder if you're a music producer, like I was, where you have a client that comes in for a single, and they come back a few months later for a three song thing.

[00:20:13] Brian: And then they come back six months later for another single. And then they come back nine months later for a 10 song album, right? That gets really hard to start tracking like all these metrics. But if you just look at it in a 12 month span, that's an easy way to look at it. Every year, I want my average annual client value to go up.

[00:20:26] Brian: I want my conversion metrics between market leads and sales leads and clients to go up. And that means I'm going to have a better business.

[00:20:32] Brian: Now there's one bonus thing I want to talk through here that can help with forecasting your revenue and it's tracking this metric called Average time to close. This is a little harder to track. If you have a good CRM, it'll track that for you. But it just says like especially for sales leads, that's the easiest one to look at.

[00:20:45] Brian: Every time I get an inquiry or a sales lead, how long on average does it take me to close that client?

[00:20:50] Brian: For me, I know it's 23 days. So I know every sales lead I get today, I know what percentage of those sales are going to convert to clients in 23 days on average. And we live in a world of averages, [00:21:00] So especially if you are generating decent amount of leads where you can actually start to depend on.

[00:21:04] Brian: statistical significance and not these wild swings because you have such small numbers, that gets really interesting because we can start to predict our revenue more effectively. That's why I was able to be within less than 1 percent of my revenue prediction last month is because I understand some of these, metrics. when an inquiry comes in, may as inquiry form or a book call or whatever, how long generally it takes to go from first. Contact there to I have the check in hand, or at least the client clothes or the project started or whatever match you're going to track.

[00:21:32] Brian: To me, it's how much, how long to the money's in my hand. Cause that's what I care about when it comes to actually getting paid. How long does that take? Is it 30 days? Is it 60 days? Is it 90 days? It's 120 days. Some of you have really long sales cycles, especially if you work in B2B. Some of you might have really short sales cycles, where it could be a number of days.

[00:21:47] Brian: if it's a 60 day lead time between. Inquiry to close 60 days. That means if I'm not getting leads right now, I may have a great month right now. I may be making buckoos of money right now. It's a feast month for me. Great. But for some [00:22:00] reason, leads slowed down, But I don't feel it because I'm making great money right now. But in 60 days from now, you're about to have a famine month and it's going to hit you like a ton of bricks. And you're not going to realize it's coming because you weren't paying attention to the fact that. This month was a slow month for you lead generation wise.

[00:22:13] Brian: So knowing average time to close allows you to level out these big feast or famine months that most freelancers struggle with because 60 days from now, when you're having that famine month, it's too late to fix that. You just start drumming up business. And then 60 days later, you have tons and tons of work and you just repeat the cycle.

[00:22:29] Brian: That's why so many people go through these feast or famine periods. It's because you don't understand average time to close, and you're not tracking any of the other four metrics that I talked about so far. So those are our client acquisition metrics. All four of those are worth tracking on a monthly basis, sometimes a weekly basis.

[00:22:44] Brian: But now we get into fulfillment metrics. We've got three more to talk about here.

[00:22:47] Brian: So once you get a client, you start a project. What are we tracking after that? an infinite number of metrics you could track in your business. This is the seven that I think are the most valuable to track. And this fifth one, this first one in the fulfillment metrics, but the [00:23:00] fifth one overall that I've talked about on this episode is average time to complete a project or to complete a deliverable, depending on how you,your business runs.

[00:23:06] Brian: give you a couple of examples here in my studio. We would have. Bands come in, record a song, or I'd be mixing a song, our deliverable would be one song. So I kept track of how long on average does it take me to do one song?Because if a client comes in for three songs or five songs or seven songs, it's too hard to have an average per client because clients are so variable.

[00:23:25] Brian: But I know that per song, I know how much time it takes me to complete a project. And what that allows me to do is properly balance workload. So when clients would come in, if they're doing seven songs, we would need a minimum of 14 days. 14 days a minimum on my calendar. And then I would have a two day buffer after every project, just in case we went long.

[00:23:43] Brian: And then I would take the next project and I would start stacking projects up. So I'd be booked solid three, five, six months in advance sometimes. And I had that scheduled perfectly so that there was buffer between I would have project back to back to back to back to back with non refundable deposits.

[00:23:56] Brian: So if they canceled, I still made money and allowed me to make sure my [00:24:00] counter was full without overwhelming myself.

[00:24:02] Brian: But also without having these massive lulls on my schedule with nothing to do. so I was maximizing revenue, making great money. while also not getting burnt out. And I was able to do that because I could track average time to complete a deliverable for me.

[00:24:14] Brian: Now, some of you, it's projects. So, like if you're a super productized service, you're doing like branding design, for example. There may be certain elements of that or web design. For another example, you're building websites. There will be certain things that can help you. add on extra time or whatever, but on average, you would just track it per project, right?

[00:24:29] Brian: Or if you're making landing pages, it might per deliverable if you're doing landing pages or funnel build outs.

[00:24:32] Brian: But once you know how long a project will take and you can accurately put those things together, put together quotes or project timelines. You can start to, again, stack up projects or even stack projects on top of each other. So when I moved away from producing full time into mixing full time, it was basically a remote mixing service where I would get files sent to me from everywhere in the world, and I would stack those up on top of each other sometimes.

[00:24:54] Brian: I might have multiple projects in a day. I'd be doing multiple projects at the same time, but I was managing it properly because I understood my [00:25:00] metrics for average time to completion for mixing. And I had a team then too, I had people that were setting up projects for me, people that were doing post stuff, and I knew how to manage all those pieces because I knew how long each should take.

[00:25:10] Brian: And that could be a, damn good project manager. If I do say so myself, if they've been pretty good at this stuff, project management is something that many freelancers struggle with and it's because they're not tracking time whatsoever. So this fifth metric, if you track average time to complete projects or deliverables, it allows you to do these sorts of things.

[00:25:24] Brian: it also gives you the data you need to set yourself up for this next metric. And that is dollars per hour. DPH. I've always called it DPH. I don't know why. You can call it hourly wage, whatever you want. this is something that if you're a flat rate freelancer, you absolutely have to know this stuff.

[00:25:38] Brian: If you're an hourly freelancer, move away from that as quickly as possible. Go to flat rate. I've talked about this at length before. There is no great reason, unless you're just a butt in a seat, there's no great reason to be a hourly or daily waged freelancer. And I'll give you just one reason why, and that is the more efficient you get, The less money you make, the faster you complete projects, the less money you make.

[00:25:59] Brian: So you're [00:26:00] incentivized to take longer. You're not incentivized to become more efficient, to speed things up, to hire a team, to delegate, automate, eliminate, mitigate any of the easy aids we've talked about. But when you do flat rate, the less time you spend on a project, the more money you make per hour.

[00:26:12] Brian: And if you can maintain quality, keeping clients happy, which is very important, it's the most important thing, while reducing your time load in something because you've delegated it to help, or you have automated certain SIPs, or you have systemized things to make them more efficient, you get to reap all of the upside.

[00:26:27] Brian: And there's plenty of ways to mitigate the downside of those clients that take too long because they're unprepared or the project's a nightmare. There's ways to mitigate that stuff. Without eating into your hourly pay, but going back to number six here, dollar per hour for flat rate people. This is really important to track so that you know that for clients, for projects, for services, because not all clients, not all projects, not all services are equal.

[00:26:47] Brian: Some clients suck. An average project might take a hundred hours for somebody. It's a pretty big project. So, you know, Your average project time and you know, your average dollar per hour earned on a project, but then you notice this one client takes double [00:27:00] that.

[00:27:00] Brian: They're super picky. They get in their head about things. They need a bunch of revisions, right? Now I know I'm either going to charge that client double. Or I'm going to turn them down. I'm going to fire that client. You don't know that stuff. If you don't track these sorts of metrics on a per project and per client basis, you might also find out that service a over here, I'm making X amount, but service B over here, I'm making Y amount.

[00:27:18] Brian: This is not adding up. This is what happened to me in 2015. I realized when I did analysis of all my data, I realized that producing and tracking bands in the studio, I was making like 70 bucks an hour, I think, maybe less than that, maybe 50 an hour. It was basically of the 122, 000 I made that year.

[00:27:34] Brian: It was like 40, 000 of that revenue, something small overall, especially compared to having bands living in the studio with me, fighting with each other, farting and burping and just being gross band dudes in the studio. But that's how much I made from that year. And that same year, I made like 80, 000 or so. There's a whole blog breakdown of this somewhere. It'll be in the show notes of this episode if you want to read the whole blog breakdown of the metrics for this, go to six figure creative. com slash three, three, two.

[00:27:58] Brian: my team will put a link to that old ass [00:28:00] article on there somewhere. But it was something like 80, 000 mixing. And that was where I could just wake up. Work when I wanted be in my my underwear if I wanted righttake my time in the morning sleep late do whatever I wanted. Like it was my own schedule I didn't have bands bringing it on my neck because it was remote mixing and I was making 80, 000 a year doing that by the end of that when I fully systemized things and hired a team I was making over 300 bucks an hour doing that So sometimes by doing this dollar per hour tracking you start to see certain projects With certain clients are just a no, no, or certain services.

[00:28:30] Brian: I should just cut out completely or start charging more for,

[00:28:33] Brian: and so this is how we start to make our business more efficient. If you're doing less of the stuff that eats away at your soul, makes you less money per hour, get rid of those clients that are eating away at your soul, making less money per hour that are paying the ass to work with, and you start doing more of those services that make you more money.

[00:28:47] Brian: Work with more of those clients than making more money. Are you identify like, Hey, this type of client in this niche are worth so much more than that niche. For some of you B2B freelancers, you might find that like, Hey, I work with blue collar businesses doing web design. And I realized if I work [00:29:00] with roofing companies, They're worth way more to me because they make a ton of money for every project.

[00:29:03] Brian: They make 20, 30, 40 grand for each client that they put roofs on. But if I work with plumbers who are making 500, 1, 000 per gig per project, they tend to beat me down on price. And I realized that these clients are making a much higher rate per client and the start working on more of those types of clients.

[00:29:18] Brian: This has a lot of implications when you start tracking these sorts of metrics that allow you to make really smart pivots in your business to have a fundamentally better business. So that's number six. Thanks. track your dollar per hour.

[00:29:28] Brian: and that's if you're a flat rate for your projects, like a flat project based rate. If you are a day rate or an hourly rate my free advice here today is make the switch as fast as possible.

[00:29:36] Brian: And now we get to number seven. This is a nerdy slash fun one. I'm going to run through some math, which is a big no, no on podcasts. I'm going to try it anyways, but it's worth just talking over these sorts of things. So you understand why your business isn't growing. Something called annual retention.

[00:29:49] Brian: If you're on recurring service or reoccurring service, they come to you again and again. Recurring is like a retainer or a subscription reoccurring is just like they come back to you sporadically project based [00:30:00] work. So for me in music production, that was a reoccurring. And then for me and like my software companies, that's recurring.

[00:30:05] Brian: The big question though, is what percentage of my clients this year. We'll be with me next year. So this one, you might have to go dig into your CRM or through your emails, your inbox or your spreadsheets or whatever to find this metric. But this is a really important one because this is how you actually start to stack clients year to year.

[00:30:20] Brian: And this is how companies grow.

[00:30:21] Brian: The goal I have for freelancers, everyone we work with, you want 70 percent of your clients to come back to you next year. Now, obviously this is niche dependent, you're a wedding photographer, you're not going to have.

[00:30:30] Brian: high client retention rate, except if you look at something like wedding planners, that can be a really good referral source. You might say, what percentage of my referral sources refer more work to me next year. So there's still ways to work around this. If you can just think, how can I do this versus I can't do this because my business is a special snowflake and nothing about my stuff is ever going to work in other people's businesses and vice versa.

[00:30:49] Brian: Don't be that person, but the goal is 70 percent plus here. And it makes your life so much easier as you stack clients each year. If you don't have to get a bunch of brand new clients every year, So I'm going to run through some math. I'm [00:31:00] going to walk you through a nine year, what it looks like in a freelance business.

[00:31:03] Brian: If you just get the same amount of clients every year, and they're all worth the same exact amount. This is an illustration because real life doesn't work this way, but you should still understand the principle here because a variation of this works in real life. But let's talk about year one. You're a brand new freelancer.

[00:31:17] Brian: You listen to this podcast, you're generating marketing leads. Those are turning into sales leads. You're having great conversations. You're closing 10 of those new clients a year. That's less than once a month. And those clients are worth an average annual client value of 5, 000. How much did you make this year?

[00:31:30] Brian: Year one, 50 grand. Cool. Really good job. I made 29, 000 my first year freelancing. So more than me. That was also 2009. So maybe it's the same equivalent now when it comes to inflation, but year one, 50, 000. Cool. Reasonable. Year two, 10 new clients. I'm doing the exact same shit this year that worked last year.

[00:31:45] Brian: That's a good year. 50, 000 your first year. I'm gonna do the exact same things.generating marketing leads. Turning those into sales leads, having good sales conversations, closing them at 5, 000 project or client values for the year, right? So I'm making 50, 000 from new clients, however, [00:32:00] 70 percent retention from last year.

[00:32:02] Brian: So of those 10 clients I had from year one, I still have seven of those. They're coming back to me again for repeat work or cross selling services or upselling to another service. So those seven clients are also worth 5, 000. So now I have 17 clients worth a total of 85, 000. I've grown from 50, 000 to 85, 000.

[00:32:20] Brian: My second year and you didn't do anything different. Just kept doing the same exact thing. Year three, same thing. 10 new clients retained 70 percent of our old clients. That's 12 old clients. That means we have 22 clients year three. Those 22 clients are worth 5, 000. That's 110, 000. So we went 50, 000 year one.

[00:32:37] Brian: 85, 000 year two, 110, 000 year three. And this is where things start to level out. Year four, we're at 25 clients for 125, Year five, we're at 27 clients for 145, 000. Year six, 29 clients, 145, 000. Year seven, only one more client. We're at 30 clients now. And this is because if you do the math here, you start to level out.

[00:32:59] Brian: You hit [00:33:00] Alex Ramoza calls your theoretical max. It's the line where the amount of clients you're losing every year, It's equal to the amount of clients you're gaining every year. So by year eight, nine, we've plateaued at 31 clients, give or take. There's some. Point something percentages in there that affected this so it's probably like 30 clients is where you'd hover around at about a hundred fifty to one hundred fifty five thousand dollars a year and in reality you would probably Fluctuate from 170 a year down to 120 a year back and forth where that just means you've hit that max point where?

[00:33:26] Brian: You're losing as many clients as you're gaining in a 12 month span, When you track annual retention like this, and you know, these sorts of metrics, you can start to understand how this can affect everything else you're doing in your business. Because if you've hit this plateau in your business and you're not growing anymore, and you have the capacity to take on more clients, you need to do one of two things.

[00:33:42] Brian: You either need to get more clients instead of getting 10 clients a year, we could get 15 or 20 clients a year. Or change nothing else. You could also just make each client worth more. So maybe you raise your rates or maybe you offer a second service, or maybe you have an upsell service or a cross sell or something else where you make each client worth 8, 000 [00:34:00] instead.

[00:34:00] Brian: let's do worst case scenario. You've raised your rates to 8, 000 instead of five and you lost one quarter, 25 percent of your client base. So you just fell from 31 clients down to 23 clients. You felt that far in one year, but because you raised your rates, You are now up to 184, You just had a.

[00:34:16] Brian: 000 raise in a year because you raise your rates. This is the power of tracking your metrics. If you can do both things, if you're able to both increase the number of clients you're getting every month, increase the percentage of clients that you retain every year, increase how much each client is worth to you every year, you are unstoppable.

[00:34:31] Brian: That's how you create freelancer that is making multiple six figures a year, especially in B2B space where you can actually make seven figures a year. We've talked about on this podcast, freelancers making seven figures a year as a solo freelancer. And in that specific case where we talked about that, that was design joy, by the way, if you're designing, you probably already know if you're web design specifically, you know about design joy, I'm sure.

[00:34:48] Brian: But in that specific case, he just had a really high average annual client value because he's charging a really high monthly subscription for his services.

[00:34:55] Brian: But these metrics are powerful. But metrics are just one piece of the puzzle. yes, it's fun for [00:35:00] some people like me, like these nerds who like to get rich on Excel, right?

[00:35:02] Brian: it's fun to put these things in spreadsheets and say, what happens if I change this and that? If you're like that type of person, awesome. If you're not that type of person, you're better off starting to become that person because it opens up the possibilities of what's possible for freelancing.

[00:35:14] Brian: And yeah, you can start to track these things on a monthly basis or weekly or even daily basis if you want to get crazy like me. But what really matters is making sure you're actually filling that spreadsheet with clients. Every single one of those cells will need clients in some capacity because you can generate all the leads in the world that you want, but if they're not turning into clients, you don't have a business and you can have clients, but if you're fulfilling terribly and they're having a terrible experience and you're not retaining them and they're not worth enough, you have a terrible business.

[00:35:40] Brian: So if you want to know how you can actually start filling your funnel in your calendar with leads and clients and start to make sure you can actually fulfill on the back end. This is stuff that me and my team can help you with.

[00:35:49] Brian: We specialize in helping freelancers build all the client acquisition systems in their business and track all the metrics in their business. So they have a fundamentally more sound business. Almost everyone that we talk to struggles with [00:36:00] these three things. Working on the right stuff, you're spending all your time, effort, energy, working on the wrong things, obsessing over the wrong things, studying gear, looking at the greatest, latest, hottest, cool, new technique in whatever field you're in, getting better and better and better at your, creative skill set, and utterly ignoring the fact that you don't have any clients, or enough clients to make your income goals that you want.

[00:36:17] Brian: one of the things we do for all of our clients is we sit down, take a look at your business, do a deep dive on everything in your business, and come up with a full plan, a full roadmap of all the stuff that needs to be changed, fixed, added, ripped out of your business.

[00:36:29] Brian: And we essentially pitch it to you and say, do you like this plan? Yes or no. If you do not like the plan and we cannot revise it to where you want it to be, we will just part ways. You don't pay us anything. You go on your way. We are going our way because we know if we cannot shake hands on this plan that this is the right thing to do, We should not work together. But once you approve that plan, then we go to actually helping you one on one implement all of those things in the plan. and that's the second area that people really struggle with is yeah I know what to do in my business Here's all the things I should be doing But I don't know how to do them where I don't know how to not overthink this right So we work with you one on one to make sure that [00:37:00] every single thing that you work on is Updated daily is done correctly is done to the highest level for a highest possible chance of success

[00:37:07] Brian: so that you're not left just guessing what you should be doing in your own little bubble. We're basically holding your hand through everything. And the third thing is actually making sure you actually complete the plan. Many people, they start doing all these things, they may even do them the right way, but they never finish it.

[00:37:20] Brian: They have all these half built bridges to absolutely nowhere. So we will work to hold you accountable to make sure you finish the bridge. You build it from point A to point B so you can cross it to get where you want to go. And so many people give up before they actually reach the goals that they want.

[00:37:32] Brian: So we are obsessive. About making sure that people we work with on their client acquisition systems actually see them to completion. And the whole point of this is so that we can build out systems that bring in those marketing leads I talked about in this episode, to bring in the sales leads I talked about in this episode, to help you close more clients at that 30 to 50 percent conversion rate that I talked about at a high enough average annual client value, where you can hit your goals and you're delivering at a good enough level where they come back to you again and again.

[00:37:55] Brian: And again, that's how you start stacking your income from year to year to year. Most freelancers have none of these [00:38:00] things. They're just sleepwalking. wandering around through life, trying to just patch things together, and it's just not working. So if it's not working for you, if that sounds like you, just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching, watch the short video on that page, see if it's interesting enough for you to take the next steps to apply.

[00:38:16] Brian: And if you apply, we'll take a look at it. We'll see if it's a good fit. If it's not, we'll let you know. Again, we reject more than half of the people that apply for this, but if it's a good fit,We'll talk you through our process. We'll jump on a call, see if you're really interested and we can talk through putting that plan together for you.

[00:38:28] Brian: So that's all I got for you on this episode. Again, website is six figure creative. com number six figure creative. com slash coaching. you can watch the video on that page, felt the short application and we'll get in touch.

[00:38:37] Brian: So that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the six figure creative podcast. See you next week.