Booked Solid? Here’s What Comes Next for (Some) Serious Creatives

385. outgrowing freelancing

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Brian: [00:00:00] most freelancers are working towards becoming booked solid. But for some of you out there, you are already booked solid, and you're wondering what now? You're making solid money, but it might feel or start to feel like you're getting stuck in client work. And I know this is how I felt when I was booked solid months in advance and I'm in this like endless treadmill of, I just did this project and now I gotta do this next project.

Brian: And oh my God, this project didn't finish, so now I've gotta do it while I'm doing this other project. And it really starts to great on you after a while, and it can feel like this thing that I've worked so hard for for so long is no longer a thing that brings me joy.

Brian: so that's the dark side of freelancing, or I guess one of the dark sides of freelancing.so in this episode, I wanna break down three of the tried and true methods to turn your freelance business. And there's something more scalable. The goal being to detach your income from the hours that have worked.

Brian: And that's one of the worst things about the freelancing business model in general, is if you don't work, you don't make money, you go on vacation, you're not making any money, you get sick, you're not making any money, you're in the hospital, you're not making any money. And so I wanna give you three different options, and we'll go deep into the one that I think is [00:01:00] probably the highest chance of success for most of the freelancers who are in that position where you are in high demand and you feel like you're trapped.

Brian: I'm just saying what I'm gonna say next. So, you know that I have been where you've been and I've done enough to at least talk about these things. But I've made nearly $6 million of non freelance income from other income streams outside of freelancing, nearly $6 million. And I've also helped eight other freelancers make this shift, or eight recently.

Brian: they're either six, multi-six, or in one case, even seven figures that I've helped make this transition out of the day-to-day, like doing work for clients into something more scalable. Through what I'm gonna talk about today,

Brian: and I'm not gonna sugarcoat any of this, whether you stay as a freelancer or you feel like you've outgrown it and you go to one of these other three paths that I'm gonna talk about today.

Brian: There are serious pros and cons, and you've gotta be the one to make the decision of which one makes the most sense for you. If you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. It's a podcast for serious creatives who want to earn more money without selling their souls. So if you feel like that might be you, you're in the part now where you're making great money, but you feel like you're selling your soul because it's not really what it was cracked up to be when it [00:02:00] was just a hobby.

Brian: Maybe this is a good episode for you today.

Brian: So the question to answer today is your book salad. What now?And I'm gonna talk about three methods of growth when you've outgrown freelancing. And then again, the last one will be the one that I'm gonna focus on for this episode because the three tried and true methods are, things you've heard about before.

Brian: I've actually talked about all of these in detail or relative detail back in episode two 70, where I talked about graduating from freelancing. The title is actually

Brian: the Three Best Ways to Graduate From Simple Freelancer to True Entrepreneur. With multiple income streams. That was over two years ago that I made that episode.

Brian: But I talked through the models without really going into depth or talking about the pros and cons of each one. So I really wanna get into this today. So the first one is the agency model. It's the first method. This is where your book's solid. What do you do now where you can start hiring, help build a team?

Brian: So you can do more of what you're already offering. So if you're a videographer, you have to videography services.There's actually one down the street from me, Cumberland Creative. they went that agency route where it's like one guy doing a lot of work in high demand, booked solid. What does he do?

Brian: Hires a team, gets the office, right down the street on from meand built an agency.

Brian: [00:03:00] And this is a tried and true method. There are plenty of agencies that are out there earning over seven figures and that's, this is one of the pros, by the way. One of the pros of owning an agency or running an agency is it's one of the few ways a creative can make it to seven figures. One of the few ways.

Brian: There are other ways out there, but this is one of the few ways, and this is probably one of the most common ways, another pro is having a team can be rewarding for some people. Like myself, I like having a team. was always a person who was anti team. I was adamant I'm just gonna be a solopreneur for the rest of my life.

Brian: And something just randomly clicked in my head around early 2023 and I changed that. I have, not gone back and I don't plan to go back, but it can be rewarding for some.

Brian: another pro is an agency is truly scalable. Meaning you can get to not just seven figures, not just eight figures. You can get to nine figures. There are agencies out there that are doing over a hundred, over 300, over $500 million a year. I think 500 million, don't quote me on that, but at least two to 300 million a year.

Brian: Now, they're generally not creative agencies. Most are in like the marketing space at that level, but there are some very large creative agencies that are out there. Let's talk about the cons now, because this is the stuff that I didn't really talk about last episode from the one, two years ago, which [00:04:00] again, if you wanna listen to that episode, just go to six figure creative.com/ 2 7 0.

Brian: That'll take you to the show notes page. There will be an embedded player there. There's also a YouTube video there of it if you wanna watch it on YouTube. But the first con is Feast. Your famine swings. If you experience 'em as a freelancer, they suck.

Brian: If you experience 'em as an agency, it's even worse because usually, that means you have to let team go or going into massive debt to stay in your team and pay the team whether or not you have work coming in, which most people are not willing to do. So it generally means letting team members go, which means having to fire people that you may have worked with for years and years.

Brian: People that depend on you for their families, for their incomes, for their food, for their vacations, for their cars, for their house, for their mortgages. And many people can't take that sort of pressure. that is a massive con if you go this route. On top of that, above and beyond feast or famine, maybe having to fire people for, the lack of being able to afford them.

Brian: There's also just the fact of managing a team can be stressful even for some, not rewarding at all, or just even downright painful ifyou've hired poorly.

Brian: This is something I fortunately haven't experienced yet with my team. I've been billing over the last couple years, two and a half years now. I've hired really good people, which [00:05:00] makes it way easier, but there's still obviously gonna be some stresses involved. Sometimes even just people are sick, people go on vacation, people don't do things they should do they're human, right.

Brian: But if managing a team sounds like a chore, an agency is probably not the thing for you. And one last con just worth talking about if you have an agency is you'll likely need to shift away from being a creative and being towards more of a manager. As you build an agency up and you have a team of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, up to 10 people, that's where you'll have to start getting actual, like middle management in place, or hiring managers or getting team leaders in place.

Brian: But until that point, you're basically the manager for all your employees. You're doing all the quality control, you're making sure they're doing their work, you're correcting 'em if they don't do stuff. If you're training, you're having to hire, train, fire, whatever. It's like it's all on you, and that means you're less of a creative and more of a manager.

Brian: If that sounds like hell again, agency might not be the right thing for you.

Brian: Now, that's the first method the agency tried and true, has some pros, has some cons. but for that specific one, the agency model, I've not done,I've never run an agency before.

Brian: The second method is selling shovels. This I have done before [00:06:00] multiple ways. A lot of my income has been through this, and this is where you look for products that people are using in your niche. It could be anything like software. Hardware, digital tools, anything that helps with the outcome involved in your industry.

Brian: So the examples that I have in this is I have, one of my SAS tools that I've helped develop and build over the years is called File Pass. We're in the middle, or actually towards the end of a full on rebrand and redesign, which is looks amazing,but it is

Brian: a tool for the audio industry, which is my background music production that helps music producers collaborate with their clients who are artists. So for you videographers out there, who know frame.io, it's basically like that, but for audio. And we also put a few other features around it that are specific for audio, like having a paywall where people can't actually download their songs until they've paid for them.

Brian: Things like that. So you don't become a debt collector, you're more of a, uh, music producer, which is what you want to be.

Brian: That's a software space. There's also the hardware space. I've seen people make preamps in the audio space or guitar pedals or some sort of compressors.

Brian: They'll make tools themselves that solve specific problems in their businesses that they then take out and sell to the mass market. The third type is [00:07:00] digital tools. That can be things like templates, that can be things like LUTs, anything that's like you're selling a tool that assists in the market that you're in.

Brian: It's usually a digital tool I guess you could just throw software under the digital tool realm, but no matter what, this can be a very scalable business. That's the first pro of this can be very scalable. You can have little to no team for some of these paths.

Brian: For both my software companies. I just have a co-founder for File Pass and then for Easy Funnels, we just have a part-time support guy to do live chat. That's basically it.

Brian: It's also the least demanding for your time once it's been set up and built.

Brian: Meaning if you have a software company and people are paying a monthly subscription to use it, then generally speaking. If they're gonna keep paying, as long as the tool's doing what it should do. So generally to keep a tool running is a lot less effort than it is to make a tool run the first time, if that makes sense.

Brian: You're just building a piece of software, it's running, and then just to manage it, fix any bugs, any glitches, little things that break here and there over time, as you bit rott happens.

Brian: It's a minimal investment of your time. The cons though, are this, it can be lonely, especially if you're doing [00:08:00] anything solo. It's the same in freelancing. It can be very difficult to grow long term because in this sort of space, generally you're selling lower ticket, meaning clients are worth dozens of dollars or hundreds of dollars, probably not thousands of dollars.

Brian: And in that case where your,average client or customer in that case might be worth. 50, 75, a hundred, 250, 300, 500, 7 $50 under a thousand dollars can be very difficult to grow long term because low ticket economics mean it's hard to advertise. And generally we have a very scalable business like software, like usually hardware, unless you have manufacturing constraints and like digital tools.

Brian: really no limit to how many customers you can have. The limit is usually on how many customers you can find for the product itself. And getting the word out about software or hardware can be very expensive. And so if it costs generally around three to $500 to acquire a customer for something that's worth three to $500, not very good economics.

Brian: All things being equal. It's usually the case where something very high ticket gets disproportionately less expensive to [00:09:00] promote if it's in high demand. Again, there's a lot of things that go into this. There's a lot of caveats to this, but generally speaking, these are just general.

Brian: Something that's expensive. It's easier to sell online than something cheap. And the last couple cons here, when it comes to like selling tools, and these are probably the biggest cons for this sort of thing, is it's first, it's incredibly competitive industry. There's a lot of bigger players out there.

Brian: And those bigger players are probably smarter than you, more driven than you have, more time than you, less constraints than you, more money than you, better education than you. Those people are gonna eat up the market share doesn't mean you can't carve out a little space for you. For example, file pass is not even a fraction of the size of frame.io.

Brian: They don't even know we exist, and that's okay. We're happy where we're at right now. but the last con here is it can take a lot of time and or money to build the product. In this case, something that's, that scalable takes a lot of front end effort and many people burn out before they ever get the tool or the product created.

Brian: ' cause it can be a lot of development time. It can be a lot of development costs, it can be a lot of manufacturing costs if it's hardware.

Brian: But this leads me to the third method when you've outgrown your freelance business, and that is going [00:10:00] into the teacher slash coach role.

Brian: and within this sort of method, there are two paths, usually. Two paths. There'sprobably a couple more, but usually there's two paths. One is teach what you know to your clients so they can do it themselves.

Brian: That can be common like in, the audio space, music production, my background where. A lot of people that want to learn how to produce themselves are other musicians who write a lot of music and they just wanna produce themselves for fun or so they can save money in the studio. So you're teaching your clients to do it themselves.

Brian: The second path is usually where you teach what you know to aspiring creatives like you so they can get better. So in the web design space, you're probably not going to teach your clients to build their own sites, although there might be a niche for that. I actually remember I was at a coworking space and I was working with a company in there called Design Live, I think was their name, and their whole business model, they moved to California to be a part of, Combinator, which is like a massive accelerator that's had some of the biggest companies to be a part of it in the tech space. But their whole model was they would just build the sites live. In [00:11:00] front of the clients, the websites so that they could learn how to manage them and build them themselves.

Brian: So that was a weird kind of caveat where they were kind of teaching businesses how to build their own sites. But I think in most cases, if you're an amazing web designer, like a high degree of,efficacy in your space, you're just gonna teach other web designers how to get better. All the tips and tricks and cool things to do to build flashy, cool websites that hopefully also convert.

Brian: Please God. But those are the two paths. Teaching what you know to your existing clients so they can do it themselves. Or teaching what you know to aspiring creatives so that they can get better. And occasionally there's overlap, like in the music production space, it's actually a really big overlap.

Brian: You'll have, like if I'm gonna teach music productions to somebody, I can teach it to bands and artists who wanna self produce so they can save money from the studio. Maybe even grow into being a music producer one day and having their own studio. Or I'll teach it to other producers who wanna get better.

Brian: They like what I do. They like my style, they like my vibe, they like my sound, and they wanna sound better. They want to get their own style, their own sound, their own vibe.

Brian: Now the pros of this are, it's very scalable. If done right, you can take this and run with it very, very far to Seven figures. Multi seven figures. This is what I do with six Figure [00:12:00] creative. This is adone with you for teaching creatives a skill set that they can use themselves, we scale this to multiple seven figures and.

Brian: it also still lets you be closer to the creativity compared to an agency at least where in an agency you're probably just managing your team, whereas if you go this route where you're teaching the skillset, you are still. Very close to the Creative Act because you're still doing it, you're teaching it.

Brian: And honestly, some of the best ways to get better at something is to teach it. So by teaching it, you are improving your skillset. And even outside of that, you still need to keep improving your skillset to stay on top of what's relevant and what's working now and what's popular now, sound-wise, in the music space or design-wise in the web branding space or, anything staying on top of it is gonna be better if you're gonna teach it right.

Brian: Another pro is that this can be scaled with or without a team. So you can have a team like I do, or you can just do it solo. Everyone kind of has their, cap there, but generally you'll kind of hit the same exact bottleneck that you hit before and you can make the same exact decision. So, just to kind of step back for a second, this is kind of a pro and a con.

Brian: In freelancing, you're working so hard to get booked solid, and you butt up against that wall and you can raise rates to kind of inch that wall up. But there's always gonna be [00:13:00] a,ceiling there, and you can inch it up by raising your rates. But over time, you're gonna hit the point where you can no longer raise your rates, and that is your max.

Brian: There's like a theoretical maximum that you can make in your niche with your, with your skillset You can edge it up over time just a little bit, but it's likely not going to make massive changes over time. So you've kind of hit the cat there, this is the maximum you can earn. And some people coast, they're happy with it, they're satisfied.

Brian: They don't wanna go anywhere, anywhere else. And some people are way more entrepreneurial and they can make this leap to an agency or building a tool or launching something like a coaching program or a course or something in the education space, right, in that space, especially in coaching, which is what I'm gonna kind of talk about more here.

Brian: In the coaching space, you can also do it solo and you don't have to have a team, but you're going to, at some point, hit your max of what you can earn as a solo coach without a team. And that can be many, many times more than you earned as a freelancer, but it's still a cap. And some people still wanna grow beyond that, and some people are happy with that.

Brian: it's your decision on this. I'm not telling anyone that any path is better than the other. I'm just telling you from my experience, what I have seen work and not work, and [00:14:00] the pros and cons associated with it. again, the pro side of this is it can be scaled without a team and it's usually much more lucrative than solo freelancing.

Brian: the last pro here is that this can be launched relatively quickly, meaning in a matter of weeks or if you're really fast a week or two, but probably closer to like a month, maybe two months tops, you can have this up and running and making income from it.

Brian: And when I say two months tops. I mean for people who are actually actively working towards it, you could drag this out for years and never make us dime off of it as well. But compared to building shovels or hiring a team for agency, this is much, much faster path to actually making solid money from it.

Brian: But there can be cons with this as well. I'd say the biggest con here is it can be frustrating. That's like the most realistic con that I have for this is it can be frustrating. It can be frustrating because. You can have client issues, people who are just not following what you say or people who are struggling to understand what you're trying to teach them forces you to be a better teacher.

Brian: It can be frustrating because of growth issues in your company if you've chosen the wrong model or frustrating with your team. If you hire bad people. You can hit bottlenecks. There's all sorts of things that can go [00:15:00] wrong, but I wanna talk about the kind of coaching model that I do because I feel like this is actually, it adapts really well for freelancers and we've actually, we've actually helped unexpectedly like eight, or nine different freelancers do this to a high degree of success and to something we don't even really promote.

Brian: It's just, it happens that in our coaching program where we're helping people get clients. We get a lot of cool creatives in here who want to shift their model once they kind of see what we're doing. And so it just kind of happens. So I'm gonna screen share here. If you're on YouTube, you'll see this.

Brian: if you're on a phone, you can go to six figure creative.com/ 3 8 5. and on there will be the YouTube video and it'll also be a screenshot of what I'm gonna kinda share here, although you have to zoom in on it ' I'm gonna be doing a lot of zooming here on the YouTube video.

Brian: But this visual right here is the model that I've kind of mapped out for the clients that we work with. It's the same model that we, wedo ourselves.

Brian: I wanna talk through it because I think it's a really cool model. So it starts like any kind of like higher price thing. It starts with a sales conversation or a sales call, or consultation call, whatever you wanna call it. This is where you're going to identify the needs of the person, figure out where the gap is between where they are now or where they want to [00:16:00] be.

Brian: And if. The thing that you can help 'em with makes sense. You sell them on what you can help them accomplish. The sales process is basically a diagnostic sale where you're diagnosing where they are now.

Brian: You're figuring out where they want to be, and there's usually a gap between those two things.

Brian: And then if the thing you can sell them will solve the problem, you make an offer. this in freelancing, do this in, agency, do this in coaching. Anything that's a higher price point that you need deeper understanding, you have to have a sales conversation. So that's the first part. The next part is an onboarding process, and everyone's is different, but just basically gathering the information you need in order to help make the transformation happen.

Brian: Same in freelancing or in coaching. This is where things start to deviate from a freelancing model into a. coaching model, and that is what I call the on-ramp. This is a one time thing. This is where you basically say, what skills or what,foundation do I need to build for this person in order to help them?

Brian: Long term? I call the on-ramp. This is where you build a machine or a skillset set. In our case for six figure creative, we help people build their client acquisition machines in this step right here. But I have another example over here on the left side of one for like a [00:17:00] music production or mixing Coach program. And that's where, in order to help someone be a better mixer, they have to first make sure they fully understand how to use their digital audio workstation or DAW how to prep sessions so they can actually start to mix things. They have to understand compression, eq, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, before they can actually start mixing music, right?

Brian: So there's a basic foundation that you have to help them build as what we call the on-ramp. And this is usually a one-time thing.

Brian: So if you're a web designer and you're teaching people how to build beautiful websites and web flow or framer, then you're gonna teach them to make sure they understand the tool that they're using before you get into all the intricate details of how to make things look beautiful. They just have to understand the foundation of it.

Brian: That's one example. you're a photographer and you're teaching people to make better photos, teaching the basics of aperture and. Framing and lighting and ISO and all the other things that photographers have to know, that would be the on-ramp. Then we get to the actual recurring, and this is the big difference that I think a lot of people miss out on when they're offering coaching, is they don't have this recurring element in there, and I think it's a detriment to both.

Brian: [00:18:00] You. The person running the business and the client who's trying to get better at a skillset is if you don't have this step in there, they're missing out on getting better over time, which I think every single transformation does take time. And what most coaching programs fail at is they'll do, like, you know, it's two months, it's three months, it's eight weeks, it's 12 weeks.

Brian: And when that's done, goodbye, you've been transformed. The problem is you've taught them the on-ramp, the skillset they need in order to start getting better, but you've dropped them at the exact point where they need the most help. Long-term to get better at something.

Brian: It's like coming to the gym. I'm gonna build your base foundation of strength up, and then I'm just gonna kick you out and say, good luck. You're on your own. You can do this for the rest of your life. No, you can't. You're probably gonna need some accountability. You're probably gonna need some more feedback on what you're doing, what you're doing wrong.

Brian: You're probably gonna need somebody to push you. You're probably gonna need someone to help you train, add things, deload, whatever. Maybe your nutrition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So let's talk through the training loop.

Brian: This is the thing you're gonna basically go through with someone as long as they wanna be with you. And this is the big unlock for me is like I've had clients for years now and we've just been going through the same kind of recurring training loop for years [00:19:00] because there's always something to fix in any business that we work with.

Brian: Just like if you're a music producer, there's always something you can do to help someone get their mixes better, or help someone write better songs or help someone make more beautiful websites, or help someone be a better branding person run better design workshops or whatever.

Brian: so the training loop looks like this. This is the recurring thing. Identify an issue that the person has. What problem do they have? What's their weakest link in the skillset you're trying to teach?

Brian: You work with 'em for them to try to fix it. They fix it on their own. They submit it for feedback for you so youcan review it and give them the feedback If it's not up to snuff, they need to get better at it. They need to improve in some certain way.

Brian: They just go back to trying to fix it again. they keep submit it for feedback. You give them more reviews, more thoughts, more ways to improve. They just go back and fix it. Submit for feedback review until you call it approve. This is good enough. Awesome. Now we go to the next issue. What's the next thing we need to work on?

Brian: The best way I can illustrate this, this is for, and we have a lot of music producers in our,in our audience for this. So I can just show you the recurring loop for, mixing. when someone has learned the basic foundation of how to mix a song, now they need to go through the [00:20:00] repetitions. They need to mix a lot of songs.

Brian: If you're a songwriter, you need to write a lot of songs. So in this case, the mixing engineer will give them the files to mix. The client will mix the song, they'll submit that song mix for feedback to their coach.

Brian: The coach will give review and give. In this case, asynchronous feedback is what this client was doing that I was mapping this out for. He's basically doing aluminum video. Here's all the things in the mix that we gotta fix. Fix it and resubmit it to me. They remix it, they submit it for feedback, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: They're just gonna keep going in that loop of submit for feedback, review it, give you my thoughts, fix these things. They're gonna resubmit it, give thoughts, repeat nauseam until again, we're there a place that it can be approved. Once the mix is approved by the coach, a new session has been assigned to work on another thing.

Brian: Okay, cool. In this mix, we're gonna focus on getting a better snare sound, or in this mix we're gonna work on. More balanced vocal or a brighter vocal or whatever you give them assignment, the thing they need to work on the most in the mix, and they just keep going over this loop again and again and again.

Brian: Let's talk about what's needed now. Let's just see this, sort of model. It [00:21:00] kind of makes sense, especially if you see it, you kind of understand, I get the gist of it. What do I need to do as a freelancer to make this transition? the first thing is just getting a basic offer and pricing model down and offer is just like, Hey, if you are struggling with your mix, I'll help you do X, Y, and Z in the next 30 days to get your mix to this level or to this standard, and I'll do it for this much money.

Brian: a basic offer together with pricing to match it. An avatar is the next thing you'll need is which avatar we're gonna sell this to. So in this case, you're trying to decide, am I trying to actually target musicians or bands who are trying to get better or am I trying to target mixing engineers who are trying to get better?

Brian: And this can differ depending on which person you are. Some people, have a bigger name in your space, and so you have a lot of attraction. From other creatives in your space, you'll have like a lot of followers who are other creatives just like you, who look up and aspire to be you. In that case, you'll probably want to target those sorts of people.

Brian: In other cases, you're like somebody who gets great results for your clients. And in that case, a lot of times you can package up what you know to get those amazing results, especially in the B2B space, and essentially sell this as [00:22:00] a done with you type program to your clients. So you're selling it to your clients to be able to implement it themselves.

Brian: So for example, if you're a copywriter and you're amazing at writing emails, for example, or you're amazing at doing product launches, that's the thing you package up and sell to your clients through a done with you type program. The third part of this is the beta program. This is the actual on-ramp you're building out first, building up the base foundation of knowledge that your clients need in order to be able to be helped long term through that recurring loop that I talked about.

Brian: so you'll wanna figure out what's your lesson plan? What are you gonna teach in this? You wanna figure out what sort of tech do I need as far as collaborating with my clients? How am I gonna deliver the teaching on this? Am I gonna do it, live?

Brian: Am I gonna do it asynchronously? Am I gonna do it through acoaching portal of some sort?

Brian: once you have the offer, the pricing, the avatar, the beta program, you'll want some sort of sales process that helps you sell this. AndI mean, you'll wanna do sales phone call or a Zoom call in this or in person if you can. That's the preferable way of doing it. But there's still more to it than just the sales process.

Brian: And like what you're saying on the calls, like the script and the outline, there's also like your follow-up process. There's also like, how are you going to sync with things from, am I doing [00:23:00] applications? Little details like that. But a lot of those are nearly the same as your freelancing. So if you've been doing freelancing for a while and you're successful with it, you can usually almost one-to-one adapt what you've been doing with this.

Brian: The only exception is if you've been doing proposals, you don't wanna sell this via proposal, you wanna do it via live call. The next piece is what I call like version one promo. This is where you're trying to fill up your beta program. You really only need five or 10 people for this to work,

Brian: and you don't want more than that.

Brian: You also don't want less than that. You don't want less than five. You don't want more than 10. Somewhere in the sweet spot is between five and 10.

Brian: And a good beta price is somewhere between two and $5,000. This depends on the clients you're working with. Depends on the niche you are, but the lowest I've seen is 2000. The highest I've seen is 5,000 for like a beta program like this.

Brian: so if you're gonna do this and you have a beta cohort of people, let's say five to 10 people, It could be anywhere on the low side of $10,000 if it's five people for 2000 each, or it can be anywhere on the high side of $50,000.

Brian: That's 10 people at $5,000 each.

Brian: From there, you'll just deliver the actualbeta program, the actual lesson plan that you're teaching.

Brian: And I encourage, in this case, when you're doing something like this. whether you're teaching live or you're teaching through likeprerecorded videos, that you do something called [00:24:00] checkpoints, and that's where you teach something. They go off and do it, and then they submit that for feedback to you.

Brian: And that feedback can either be done on a live call every week, or it can be done asynchronous, so they can just submit it and you can give feedback through something like Loom.

Brian: But when you're delivering this beta, you wanna make this a two-way street where they're doing actual work, submitting it for you to review, and you're giving real feedback. It's kind of like what I said earlier, where you're going through that feedback loop. You're doing little mini feedback loops during the on-ramp part.

Brian: This is the one time thing you're learning, the base skillset, how to use. web flow or how to actually set up a session and mix it for the first time. If you've never done it before, this is where you're gonna be like, all right, go set up a session, send me a the session itself, or send me a lum video of you going over the session so I can look at all the stuff that you did.I'll look through it. I'm gonna give you my notes, and you're gonna go back and fix all the problems that I see. You're basically doing quality control in this case, and once you've delivered the beta and you've gone through it, obviously you're gonna improve it over time. You're gonna revise it over time, but that's where you shift to the recurring offer, and that's where you might at that point.

Brian: Help them with their long-term design process. Help 'em with their long-term copywriting process. Whatever your niche is, you shift them over to the recurring offer. That's the, big [00:25:00] picture, 30,000, 40,000 foot view of how to deliver something like this. When you're looking to graduate, lemme talk about who this works for and who this doesn't work for.

Brian: 'cause this is a really important part of this. This works for, and I've seen this work and we have clients in the music and audio space. We see this work with music producers. Mixing engineers, mastering engineers, songwriters, or songwriting for composers. we've seen this work when you're teaching your clients how to do it themselves or teaching aspirational creatives or aspirational producers in the audio space who want to get as good as you are.

Brian: We've seen both of those work. this can work in the web design or brand design space. That's where you're teaching aspiring designers, not as much as teaching. Your clients to do it themselves. That can work, but that's not the direction that I would probably push people. It's more about teaching the aspirational people.

Brian: This works in copywriting where you're teaching business owners how to do it themselves, or teaching aspiring copywriters how to be better at writing copy.

Brian: One of our coaches actually is a,long, long background as a freelance copywriter and he has a. Multi-six-figure copywriting coaching program of his own. So if you're a copywriter and you're in the space, he might be a good coach for you. Photographers, videographers is [00:26:00] another one where if you're teaching aspiring photographers and videographers to get better at their craft, there's so many different verticals and little niches and,nooks and crannies, you shouldn't fit within.

Brian: That would be worth doing. But there could also be, if you're like a,videographer who does content and your big specialty is creating content for your clients for social media and things like that, but you charge an arm a leg for it and you work with big clients. It could also work where you're teaching smaller versions of your clients, like smaller business owners or micro influencers, how to do it themselves with your style methodology.

Brian: So that can work as a crossover to where you're working with clients and not with other creatives. Now there's way more, but like thatshould give you an idea of likewho this works for and who it could work for. But let's talk about who this doesn't work for. This doesn't work for you if you don't like working with other people.

Brian: guess in freelancing you can kind of go off in your dark cave and just tweak knobs and numbers and play with things and design stuff or mix things or whatever without any sort of outside input. But if you don't like working with people, you don't wanna run an agency you don't wanna coach.

Brian: Those are the two things. You could either keep freelancing in your cave, in your bubble, or you could try to build the shovels, like I talked about, that second method where you're building a tool of some sort that can be done in a dark, [00:27:00] damp cave.

Brian: The second type of person this won't work for is if your skillset isn't desirable. when I say desirable, you don't have to have a skillset that's like, has a high ROI attached to it. You can make really good money just teaching pottery or art or design or whatever,

Brian: even if the people you're teaching have no professional aspirations with it, they just wanna learn the creative skill in some cases that's even easier to scale.

Brian: People are in the self-actualization mode of life where they're trying to become their best selves. And you can aid them in that. Those are really healthy people to work with. They're really fun people to work with. But it also obviously works when it's tied to ROI as well. But what I do mean is if your skillset isn't desirable from the standpoint of are you actually good at what you do?

Brian: Do people desire the skillset that you have, whether you are. In the creative space that has no real professional aspirations tied to it, like just becoming an artist for fun or making pottery. Yes, you can make money making pottery. I'm not saying you can't, but I'm just saying those are things that may not be directly tied to an ROI alike.

Brian: A copywriter would be copywriters, like all ROI in most cases, especially direct response copy. But basically, are you good or not? That's the [00:28:00] bottom line here. If you're not good, this won't work for you. Another time this won't work for you is you could be good at what you do, but if your proof isn't impressive, then it's gonna be difficult for you to market yourself.

Brian: you have to either be so absolutely, clearly amazing and above everyone else around you just by looking at your work, or you have worked with impressive names. Or you've gotten impressive results for clients. If none of those things are true,

Brian: then this will likely not work for you and you'll fall flat. Another way, this won't work for you. Another type of person this won't work for you is, is if you are not a good teacher. Now, this is myself. Like there's literally a YouTube video of me saying I'm a terrible teacher. It's like the first YouTube video I ever posted.

Brian: And that ended up not being true. It was just a belief I had, but at the time, I wasn't a good teacher, but I did grow and develop that skill over time. So you can shift in, become a good teacher, and you're not stuck at any one level as far as am I a good teacher or not. But you do have to have a baseline ability of teaching in order to transfer a skill to somebody, because knowing a skill is not the same as transferring that skill to someone else.

Brian: It requires some level of patience. It requires some level of empathy. It requires some level of just being able to [00:29:00] communicate your ideas and thoughts, especially something more nebulous in the creative space into actual actionable frameworks and structures that people can actually use. So you have to be willing and able to create structured curriculum or repeatable systems, which some creatives that just sounds like death to.

Brian: If that sounds like you, this may not be the move for you. When I'm talking about coaching, I don't mean just getting on a call with someone every week and justbeing their like creative counselor, being their creative life coach. That's not what I mean. Transferring skill sets to someone else so they can actually become good at something,

Brian: for some people out there, this is the right move.

Brian: Where you like working with people, your skillset is desirable. You have some sort of impressive proof behind your work or results behind your work, and you are or could be a good teacher again, I've gathered all this not just for myself, but from the other nine creatives that I've helped do this with. Of the nine creatives I've helped in our coaching program, one is at seven figures. Five or six are at multi six figures. One is just below the six figure mark. He's like the six figure run rate, probably at like 7,000 a month, something like that.

Brian: And we're still working [00:30:00] with him and one is just brand new and he just got started. So yeah, I don't have any numbers on him. This is something that we don't even offer formally. This is not something like we help people with formally. We have no offer for this. We have no help publicly done for this.

Brian: But I also realize this is something you should look out for yourself, that sometimes your niche chooses you. You just, without even looking for it, you find these sorts of clients or clients that seem to have more success with you or clients that you really love working with, or clients that have some sort of like cool thing that happens that can be something worth leaning into.

Brian: So I'm gonna attempt to lean into this. and so you might see from this podcast and maybe a couple of the emails, I'm going to do my own beta program where I'm gonna help five of the right freelancers grow a scalable kind of program and get it up and running a six figure scalable program.

Brian: So I mean like a done with you type coaching program. Like I showed in the model that I screen shared with. The goal is to detach you from the dollars per hour bottleneck that a lot of freelancers hit, where you've hit that upper limit and you feel stuck and you can't get away from it. And I've seen the numbers behind this.

Brian: A good freelancer can earn about 75 an hour, up to a hundred an hour if you're in a really high demand space and you've inch your values [00:31:00] up. but in a scalable program, I've seen $250 per hour and up. It can be very, very good. Even in the beta context.

Brian: So if you are a in demand freelancer, meaning you've worked with probably a hundred plus clients, you are well above average with your skillset. You have a good personality, meaning like you can show up on camera, on Zoom calls with some level of energy and like. Can communicate that I'm putting this offer out there for those of you who match that sort of criteria.

Brian: just go to six figure creative.com/beta There should be a short-ish, I dunno how long it's gonna be. I haven't made the application yet, but it'll be an application on that page to fill out. And I'm going to see who comes through there. And if I see enough people that I feel excited about helping with this, meaning you have, probably hit your capacity as a freelancer, you are probably already making good money.

Brian: You are trying to escape that sort of like dollars per hour hamster wheel that I found myself in. And you wanna try making that shift into something more scalable to either help your clients do it themselves or help other creatives like you, who aspire to be you. Just go to six figure creative.com/beta.

Brian: Fill out the short application and I'll be in touch with [00:32:00] you

Brian: and this will be something that I'll work personally with you on.

Brian: If I end up doing this. If I don't get enough interest or I don't get enough people that are of the high enough quality where I think this is feasible for you, then I just won't do it. But go to six figure creative.com/beta something I'm trying out and we'll see where it goes. So that's all I got for you this week on the six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: Until next time, peace and thanks for listening.