Building A Demand Engine That Takes You From $100k to $250k+ | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

358. Multi-6 figure playbook pt 3_Demand Engine

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Brian: [00:00:00] Trying to earn six figures as a freelancer is hard enough.

Brian: Trying to get to multiple six figures a year as a freelancer is even harder because as you get more and more booked up you get more and more busy. And as you're more and more busy, you let a lot of things slide. kind of just let fires burn essentially. And when you inevitably have that lull in your schedule that comes, you essentially just treat that as a much needed time off, much needed rest.

Brian: So you either just take it easy and don't do anything during that time because you're kind of burnt out and you're trying to recover, or you end up using all that time to put out all the fires that have been building up to that point.

Brian: The problem is those lulls in your schedule is what is holding you back from breaking 200 K or 300 K or 400 k or whatever your multi six figure a year goal is. Those lulls in your schedule cannot happen. Because those lulls in the schedule AKA gaps in your schedule between projects are opportunity cost.

Brian: All of those gaps in your schedule could be filled with paid projects to get you over that multiple six figure year hump. On top of that, the lulls in your schedule, some that last too long, or some that were unexpected or cancellations that came through and now you're like desperate to get a project in there.

Brian: Those turn into, you lowering your rates because you need to fill the lull in your schedule.

Brian: Puts downward pressure on your pricing even high [00:01:00] earning six figure freelancers are not immune to this.

Brian: So breaking six figures is hard, don't get me wrong, but it's much easier than breaking into multi six figures because there's just so much leeway you get away with at six figures that you just don't get at multi six figures.

Brian: so instead of letting these gaps happen, let's talk about building what we call a demand engine. A demand engine is something that's gonna keep your inbox full of inquiries. It's gonna keep your counter full of paid projects so that you can start to charge more because you have plenty of inquiries and that in the inbox, so you can just confidently raise your prices over time.

Brian: And then you're not having these gaps in your schedule that are eating away at your revenue for the year.

Brian: So that is gonna be the topic of today's episode. Before I get into that,

Brian: hi, I'm Brian Hoot. You're listening to the Six Figure Creative podcast. Either you're new here or you've never listened before. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more money from your skills without selling your soul. And we do that through lots of influencers, from lots of industries.

Brian: for example, I've built six figure creative into a multi seven figure a year business. My freelance career was a multiple six figure a year business, and grossed well over seven figures, maybe multiple seven figures through the decade that I did that. I've also built six figure income streams in different areas like real estate, [00:02:00] software, music.

Brian: and now my team that I've built out at this company, I have multiple team members who have built, multiple, six figure a year companies. So we have lots of influences from my background, my team, their background the guests we bring on this podcast, their background.

Brian: So if you like to have lots of perspectives from lots of different people, including the 200 plus freelancers and agencies that we coach for client acquisition, this is the right place to be for you.

Brian: So let's get into the demand engine thing. There's something I wanna talk about from Alex or Mosey somebody. I, I look up to somebody I've followed a lot. Love him or hate him. knows his stuff when it comes to client acquisition. He talks about this thing called a theoretical max in a business.

Brian: The theoretical max is basically, you can take two numbers. If he knows two numbers, he can tell you how large your business would be. this is what he did with me and my company when I was there back in August.

Brian: And this is what I've heard him talk about with other companies he's consulted with or people that are part of his portfolio. It's essentially you can take the number of new clients you get each month, the percentage of your clients that you're losing each month, you know those two numbers, and you can basically calculate how large your business will be before it starts to plateau. It's a theoretical max. It's essentially equation that tells you where just about you'll bounce kind of between on your upper monthly [00:03:00] income freelancers.

Brian: This is pretty difficult if you don't have a recurring service where you can track what's called churn, I have 10 clients and I lose one every month, that means I have a 10% churn rate. If you don't have a recurring service, very difficult to figure out what your churn rate is, but you still have it as a freelancer, assuming you ever have clients come back to you.

Brian: So in the audio world, music world, which is my background, music production, generally, you'll have about between 50 and 70% of your clients will come back to you each year.

Brian: And so if you know what percentage of clients come back to you every year, let's just say 50%, then we know you lose roughly 50% of your clients every year, and you can take that 50%, you can divide it by 12, and that gives you about a 4% churn rate each month. Something like that.

Brian: The reason I bring this up is because when you know there's two numbers, there's only really two ways to grow your business. You either bring in more clients each month, or you keep clients around longer, or keep clients coming back more,

Brian: And in this episode, we're focusing on that first piece. How do we get more clients in the door? Now obviously, the second part of the equation is just as important for you people to have a monthly recurring service or a monthly retainer or some sort of subscription freelance service that I've talked about a lot on this podcast.

Brian: The longer you keep clients the easier it is for your business to grow. Obviously, however, it takes both sides. You can't just [00:04:00] have 10 clients and just ride them till they die. You have to continuously bring in new clients every month or every few months, depending on how your business model is.

Brian: so we're gonna focus on that first part today. The demand engine. How do we get more clients for you every single month

Brian: at six figures when you've earned six figures as a freelancer. You're good at what you do that's proven. You've proven that you're good at what you do or people wouldn't hire you. There's proven demand for what you do, which is not necessarily the case when you're a really low earning freelancer or somebody who's just getting started.

Brian: You don't know if there's actually proven demand for the service or services that you offer. You know, The business model works or at least works within reason if that's not the case for you, if you've just have a terrible business model and you're just barely eking out six figures, maybe you need to fix that before we worry about demand engine stuff.

Brian: And number four, we know at this point you have an offer that scales generally.

Brian: And what I mean by that is you could in theory take enough clients to get to at least 200 KA year. If not, you don't have a scalable offer. Meaning ifyour clients are worth 10 grand and you can only take on 10 projects a year, you don't have something scalable to multi six figures.

Brian: So assuming all those things at six figures, you're set up to do a multi six figure business. Now. We just need to fill your roster, fill the slots on your calendar, fill you up so that you can actually break that [00:05:00] threshold.

Brian: That is where a demand engine kicks in. It is a repeatable process that brings in consistent, predictable leads and clients every single month. I've also called this a client acquisition machine or a client acquisition system.

Brian: Call it whatever you want. I like demand engine for this purpose because it kind of puts demand

Brian: into two different buckets.

Brian: The first bucket is there's existing demand for your service out there right now, we need to do is put your bucket under that stream of demand.

Brian: Just for a little mental metaphor, it's like it's already there. Just put your bucket under there and capture it, right? So demand capture. The other bucket is demand creation. It is taking people that are perfect fits for your service and creating demand for your service. Maybe they didn't know they needed your service, maybe they didn't even want your service, but you can say and do things that end up creating the demand outta thin air.

Brian: a quick example for this in music production, again, my background is whenever you have someone who is a musician and you're a music producer, if there's no song that exists, then there's no music to be produced, right? So a way to create demand is help your clients write more great songs if they want to then be produced.

Brian: That is an example of taking an action and doing some things in order to create demand. You've literally [00:06:00] created the song idea from scratch with the client to then be produced and be paid for.

Brian: So the better you get at knowing which one of those two buckets you really wanna focus on, whether you're trying to just capture the demand that's already there, like there's plenty of people that need new websites. Just put your bucket under the people who need new websites and capture more of those.

Brian: Or if you need to create new demand, it's a very competitive market. There's lots of people in there. It's a blood bath instead of participating in the blood bath. Play the Blue Ocean game and just start creating demand with your clients. That's something that works well in the music production space just for that example.

Brian: Now, the most important part of an engine is that it actually works consistently. If it's not consistent, it can't be depended on what's the point of it? It's imagine like getting in your car and your car just decides to start whenever it wants to. Just occasionally starts.

Brian: You gotta the store. You got your groceries, you got your ice cream melting in the bag. The car decides not to start. That's not a very dependable car. Most people are not gonna accept that. However, most people accept the ups and downs in their schedule. The ups and downs and inquiries that come in, they just accept that that's how it's, it doesn't have to be. I think if more freelancers took the same approach to their car engine that they took with their demand engine, it would be a game changer for them. You would not accept. [00:07:00] ice cream melting in your backseat. If your car didn't start all the time, if it just left you a stranded and abandonedhalf the time because it didn't decide to work that day, you wouldn't accept that.

Brian: You would go either get a new car or you get that engine fixed. If you took that same approach with your demand engine and you said, I am not accepting this lack of leads this month, this lack of clients this month, this big low in my schedule, I refuse to accept that I'm going to fix this engine.

Brian: That would be a game changer for you. So let's talk about the four core components of your demand engine.

Brian: And I've talked about all these things before, so this is nothing new for my longtime listeners, but I'm going to talk about these things through the lens of a person trying to break multi six figures. 'cause there are some nuance here for people that are already at six figures trying to get into multi six figures.

Brian: Particularly with time, you don't have a lot of excess time at your, at disposal. but when you don't have time, you generally have more money. So we're gonna approach it from the perspective of you have some funds here.

Brian: so the first core component of your demand engine is visibility. It's just getting found. This is the biggest part. The more people are aware of your service, the more people are aware that you exist. The more people see that you are visible consistently, the more gigs you're going to get just naturally.

Brian: And I recommend until your past seven figures, and even probably to multi seven [00:08:00] figures, just focus on one mode of visibility. one method.

Brian: A lot of freelancers, they do social media and that's fine. However, that's only fine if a, you have the time to do it. Two, you're good at it. And being good at it means you are actually being discovered by new people every single week, every single month. Most people on social media are pretty stagnant.

Brian: And if you're stagnant, people are seeing your content, you're getting likes, you're getting comments. I guess maybe some dms, maybe people are even inquiring about your services from social media. But that's not discovery. That's not a way of getting new eyeballs on your business. That is literally, that's way down the funnel.

Brian: Let's nurture. That's not discovery. So my favorite is paid ads. As you scale, you're gonna have more money, you're gonna have time, and that only becomes more and more accurate. The bigger and bigger you get. But just to give you an example, right now I can manage 20 to $30,000 per month of profitable ad spend.

Brian: We're at about a seven to 10 X row ads. It means a seven to 10 x return on ad spend, and I manage that with about two hours a month of my time. every couple of months or so, I spend another two to three hours making new ads, refreshing the ads.

Brian: I've gotta dial in enough to where that's been my cadence for the last year and a half. I [00:09:00] cannot devote multiple hours a week to creating dedicated short form content for social media. I cannot do it. I don't have the time. I don't have the bandwidth. I don't even have the desire.

Brian: And even if I did, if I said, am I willing to trade that? A couple, few hours a week to do short form media so I don't have to spend 20, 30,000 a month on paid ads. The math makes sense. Like Was it eight hours a month to save 20, 30 grand? Potentially. Assuming I even have the skillset and the face for it, I don't, but let's just say that I could do that.

Brian: The big problem with that is still not consistent social media or organic social media. You are.

Brian: 100% dependent on the algorithm. And when you're having to create fresh new stuff all the time as a creative, that can be draining, it can be difficult to come up with fresh new stuff. It's essentially every single day you're starting from scratch to get new eyeballs on your business. That then trickles down to more leads, more clients, as we grow and as we have a team that we scaled out, I have payroll now.

Brian: I have fixed expenses. I can't depend on something that does this up and down jagged mess in order to run my business for new eyeballs, for new discovery, for people to getto learn about my business.

Brian: There's a guy I met at that Hormoz event I was at back in August. He had a YouTube [00:10:00] channel with amaybe a couple million subscribers on it, and that was his main source of discovery. New people finding him on there.

Brian: He built his business to a few million a year. Very good business. But the problem was he hired a bunch of people and He couldn't keep those people paid with the way his business was. Because with any sort of organic media, you're gonna have natural ups and downs.

Brian: You have one viral video it, skyrocket your business, and all of a sudden you can't sustain that for long term. So the hires you made, because their demand was so high. Now it starts to come down and you find a new level and you have to let people go. It's very difficult.

Brian: Whereas the thing I like about paid ads is I can generally track my numbers. I can play it like a game. I know the numbers When things are off, I know how to fix it. I know how to troubleshoot it.

Brian: Over time, I've gotten my cost per acquisition down.

Brian: However, that's just my choice. It's something that works with, how my business is. My business is still very profitable

Brian: And I don't have to spend a bunch of time doing that. Anything can work though. Anything can work. Cold outreach can work. Social media, marketing, short form media

Brian: podcasting can work, blogging can work Anything that you try can work, it's just a matter of consistency. Can you consistently execute it? can you consistently get results back from [00:11:00] it?

Brian: Not what most people do on social media, which is, I'm gonna take this seriously, and you start posting like a madman or mad woman every. Day, twice a day for a couple weeks, and it starts to tail off every other week now every three weeks. Now, once a month now. And then you just give up on it or you just put into maintenance mode.

Brian: That is intensity. We don't want intensity, we want consistency.

Brian: But the goal is to essentially put your business out in front of new eyeballs.

Brian: The second part of a good, reliable, stable demand engine is attraction. It's just getting all that visibility and turning it into leads I bucket leads into two different categories. One is, we call them marketing leads. These are people that you just get an email address, maybe a name from somebody who can nurture long term.

Brian: They haven't really expressed direct interest in hiring you right now.Maybe they started the process but gave up. Maybe they downloaded some lead magnet you had maybe they filled out your contact form, but again, it wasn't directly expressing interest in hiring you. Just a general inquiry of some sort.

Brian: The second bucket is what we call sales leads. These are people that have directly expressed interest in hiring you working with you in some way. They've, asked for rates. They've fully filled out your [00:12:00] inquiry form, they've booked a call with you, et cetera. Whatever you quantify as that.

Brian: and with this, when you're trying to turn that visibility into more leads, you wanna make it as easy as humanly possible for someone to become a lead. So that means on your main website you have call to actions plastered all over it. you've probably seen this, you're like, why is there like17 buttons that say get started?

Brian: That's because there can be a billion options on any given website for someone to do. There can be four to seven or more menu options, sub menus, social media buttons. You have multiple social media buttons for all the social media accounts you have. You can have all the stuff on your website footer, like privacy policy, whatever.

Brian: then you have obviously your portfolio and all the things on your site, it gets distracting. So you want to always make sure it's easy as possible for someone to become a lead for you knowing the next step. And that's what those big, bright call to action buttons generally are.

Brian: If you have a website, I prefer the getting started workflow. I've talked about this in past, podcast episodes and YouTube videos, but get started basically means when they're on your site, your main call to action is just get started. They click the button. It just pops up and asks for email or name an email, and then it captures them as a lead.

Brian: That's now a marketing lead. And then on the next page, then you get all the information you need as far as an inquiry [00:13:00] form or to get them to book a call or the bigger ask. So it starts with a small ask. Then goes, to the bigger ask that will get you way more leads that you can then nurture long term.

Brian: The other way of making it as easy as showing impossiblefor people to become a lead for you is to not send people to your website. It's counterintuitive to say that, but if you're running ads or you're doing social media, send them to specific, dedicated funnels for the thing that you're talking about.

Brian: You've probably seen freelancers or, or any sort of content creators who are big on social media when they're creating stuff. They'll say comment, poop, and I'll send you my favorite fertilizer guide. I follow a a lot of gardening guys on there. Anyways. Let's say, comment a word and I'll send you a thing, right?

Brian: Generally what that'll do is it'll trigger an automation. It'll DM you a link, and the link will get you to sign up for something in a funnel, not a website, A funneland a funnel gives you two options, not 20, just two options. The options are I can sign up for the thing or I can leave. Those are the only two options that I have, when you do it that way, you will get way more leads than if you just dump them on your website.

Brian: But that's the second part of a good demand engine is the ability to turn all that visibility into leads. The third part is the nurture [00:14:00] process. Basically having staying power long term. If you'vealready at six figures and you're trying to get a multi six figures,you are in this for long term.

Brian: You're not just a fly by night company. You're not somebody who's just gonna give up at the first sign of struggle, which I've seen many freelancers do, do. You're here for the long term, so treat your leads that way. We recently just got a client and the first time we talked to them on a sales call was

Brian: over 500 days ago. 'cause we track the distance between, it's called time to close. We track the time to close from first call to actual close 500 days. That's long-term follow up and nurture. It's mostly nurture in that case, but most people that they're not ready to actually hire you for your services the first time they talk to you.

Brian: So your goal should be to stay top of mind until they're ready. And all along the way, while you're staying top of mind, you're also building trust. You're building credibility, you're building authority to be the go-to person in your niche for the services that you offer.

Brian: And this is where social media can really shine. If you can get them to actually follow you on social media, that's a whole other thing to talk about. But if you can get them to follow you on social media, that's a great place to nurture them. If the almighty algorithm, shines upon them, which is not guaranteed, really not guaranteed.

Brian: So when it comes to [00:15:00] nurturing leads, I have two of my favorites personally. The first is email marketing, and the reason is in most cases your leads are email addresses, and so if you already have the email address, then you might as well email those people. I've seen and this is niche dependent, most freelancers will get about a 40% open rate on their emails.

Brian: Meaning if you send a hundred emails out to a hundred leads, 40 of those people will actually open it and read it. If you send 10,000 out, 4,000 of those will open it and read it. Way better than most social media analytics. If you look at most media accounts, you'd be lucky to have 10 to 20% of your followers see any given post that you have.

Brian: Obviously there can be higher,

Brian: but keep in mind that's assuming you can even get them to follow you on social media in the first place.

Brian: ' cause you'll never get a hundred percent of your emails to go over to social media. And then when you get them to social media, you're getting 10 to 20, maybe 30% of those people to actually. See your content. I also, one of my favorites for inertia is this podcast. This is a weekly podcast. I've been doing it for 358 episodes now.

Brian: Wow, wow, Wow. Pat myself in the back. Yay.

Brian: I don't think most podcasts even make it to the 35th episode, much less the 358th,

Brian: but I like this medium because I like to talk. Obviously I talk fast. I can do a 45 minute episode by myself. I like talking to guests, [00:16:00] although I hate the process of sourcing guests, so that's why we have not had them in a long time. we'll get more sometime. If you have a guest to suggest, just email me, brian@sixfigurecreative.com.

Brian: Always hoping I'm bringing guests on. I just I never go out on my way to source them.

Brian: But this is the same issue as, social media. It's hard to get everyone over to the podcast to listen. So we have, roughly 50,000 people on our email list right now, give or take. And we might have five to 10,000 monthly listeners for this podcast.

Brian: But I would argue that a podcast listener is just way more. Interested and valuable to us and to the company than a email subscriber because you're listening to me for some reason. I don't know why, but you're gonna listen to me for 45 minutes to an hour, up to four times a month. That's pretty powerful and that's why I like it.

Brian: So that's the third part of the four core components of your demand engine. You got visibility, new eyeballs on your business attraction, you turn that visibility into leads to made it easy, become a lead, nurture them for long terms, have good staying power. Have 358 episodes. That's staying power for sure.

Brian: That's like six or seven years of this podcast or more. I think we took a a, brief six eight month gap. They're in the middle somewhere. The fourth core component is [00:17:00] conversion. That's actually turning the interest into clients. Now, conversion can be a bunch of different things. It's sales, obviously. We have a whole sales series if you want more on this.

Brian: Episode 2 85 is the entire freelance sales process from beginning to end. It's a three part sales series. So just go to six figure creative.com/ 2 8 5 to start that series right now. Episode 2 86 is the super simple four part process for sales calls, then the 2 87. The next, the last episode of that series is the follow-up process that helped me double my freelance business,

Brian: but bottom line here is you need a sales process that can reliably turn 25 to 50% of qualified sales leads. People that have raised their hand, they're interested in working with you, they're a good fit for you, you're a good fit for them. Can you convert? 25 to 50% of those people into paying clients

Brian: if you can, you got a pretty good model, and if you can, that's a pretty decent sales model, especially as you start to scale, especially with paid ads with strangers that are looking to hire you. And then for all those people you don't close, you follow up with 'em until they say yes eventually. So in the case of the guy who is 500 days to close.

Brian: Followed up until you said yes. You follow up until they say yes. You follow up until they say no, which is okay. No is good, [00:18:00] valid answer. But you don't follow up until you hear nothing because a no decision by default is always a no. So if you follow up until they say yes, you follow up until they say no.

Brian: You follow up until they die, or you follow up until you die. You'll get more clients

Brian: on average for my freelance business. 50% of my clients came from follow-up, either sixth or grader, or eight or greater. Somewhere in that lane, like six or seven or eight follow-ups or more on average for half of my income.

Brian: So those are the four components of a, good demand engine. However, we don't have a lot of time. As you get to six figures, multi six figures, you don't have a bunch of time. so the goal is to automate as much as this as possible. So I wanna talk about systems and automation.

Brian: To scale your demand engine, main tools are you need a great CRM from managing all the sales leads you're gonna get, and a sales lead. As soon as someone raised their hand, they're now in your CRM, in your CRM, you're gonna manage them on a pipeline. think about like a kan board or a Trello board, anything that allows you to visually see where your leads are in the pipeline.

Brian: For managing follow-up reminders. A good CRM will have follow-up reminders so that you never leave, a lead to die essentially, right on the vine, they call it decay, I think, or lead rot, I think is what they call,

Brian: but you want a good [00:19:00] CRM for that, especially one that can manage the pipeline changes automatically for you. The second thing you'll want as far as main tools are a good form builder. Most website or funnel builders have this, but you want one for capturing leads and then gathering project data from sales leads.

Brian: So just think about like a general good lead capture form, name and email, and then a good inquiry form that has all your questions. Preferably, by the way, preferably on a one question per page kind of app. So a good form builder for that is Typeform. We split test that against another one and had a much higher conversion rate on that.

Brian: Third tool you'll want is a good calendar tool. So think Calendly, something like that where you, a prospective client can just click on a link, they can look at all the times available and just choose the one that works for them. No calendar tag, no manually reaching out and trying to connect and find times.

Brian: And then send calendar invites.

Brian: You'll need a good email marketing platform for managing an email list, sending emails, and. Obviously if you automate some of the follow-ups, automate some of the nurture, and then finally is a good payment tool. I talked about, a, a client of ours who was manually typing up invoices on like Word and then turning 'em into PDF and then sending 'em to the client.

Brian: none of it was automated. It was really [00:20:00] messy. So a good payment tool for. Getting paid, sending invoices with automated reminders so when someone doesn't pay it automatically reminds them. and bonus points if the invoicing toy you useallows credit cards, payments, debit card payments, PayPal payments if you're in a niche where there's PayPal used regularly, and then bank transfers as well.

Brian: Because, we have a client of ours, she was collecting a 40 or $50,000, payment from a client. we walked her through setting up to where her invoice tool only allowed bank transfers so that her maximum fee was five bucks. paying the, 3% stripe fee on a $50,000, project is like 1500 bucks.

Brian: So saving her $1,495 by just having a good invoicing tool. It is worth it. So I've used lots of these in my lifetime. I've used Pipedrive, CRM, I've used ActiveCampaign for email marketing. I've used close.com For CRM, I've used Dedo, CRM. I've used every invoicing tool there is. I've used Calendly for booking calls.

Brian: I've used a lot of different things. A lot of website builders, funnel builders. the thing that I've been using for the last two years, by far my favorite tool I've used for [00:21:00] all of these things is a tool called high level. It's at go high level.com.

Brian: We are not an affiliate or anything Every single funnel you see of mine, every single email or text you get from us if you're in our funnels, all the invoicing or payments that we receive, all the automations, their calendars, the forms, the websites, the funnels, the CRMs, all of it is amazing.

Brian: And it's the first all in one tool I've seen that actually does each individual thing very well. And now I'm not an affiliate of them. However, I loved it enough to pay them a lot of money to become. What they call a white label, which essentially lets me brand it under the six figure creative banner so that I can actually build out all the automations, all the templates, all the funnels, everything ahead of time we use it for all of our clients, by the way.

Brian: So when our clients start to load things up, they don't have to build it all out from scratch. If you sign up for go high level. From their main website, you're essentially just gonna get a blank slate. And they have some prebuilt templates, but they're not for freelancers, and it really doesn't make sense.

Brian: So it's all built out. We'll release it publicly soon-ish. If you want to get an early invite for that, if you're interested in having kind of an all-in tool, again, one we've been using for the last two years, and one that we have good support network for, go to six figure [00:22:00] creative.com/crm and get on the wait list.

Brian: Or if you're just looking into what all it does, just look up on YouTube for high level. they have a hundred thousand plus agencies using it. It's a massive tool at this point. Massive team, hundreds of millions of dollars company. They're doing well But that is by far, I could not run the company that we have now without this tool.

Brian: And then finally, I just wanna talk about optimizing and improving your demand engine. This is a huge part of being a successful business, is not just building it all. It's actually continuously optimizing it. For example, when I first built out a lot of the things that I have for this company, they worked fine, but they were horrible.

Brian: And so over time I've optimized as we've gotten team members on who have more experience than I have in a lot of things. Like one of the new guys we brought on has spent over 15 million on paid ads. He has doubled two companies from three to 6 million in less than a year. Do you think I'm using him as a good resource for information with improving and optimizing everything in my business?

Brian: Absolutely. Thanks, Dennis. But most freelancers they either build it all or they have it all and they don't even know the first thing to do to even start to optimize this. So I think about it, like if you're trying to drive a car from LA to New [00:23:00] York, thousands of miles and your car's getting one mile per gallon, it's a very inefficient engine, right?

Brian: Have a stop for gas every 15 miles or so. I don't think you could do it. There's probably many gaps longer than 15 miles. Even at three miles a gallon or five miles a gallon, it's still a terrible trip, but if you can optimize it 25 miles a gallon up to 30 miles a gallon, now you got an actual, like a normal car that can make the trip, no problem.

Brian: So the goal is to get your business to that, optimization point.

Brian: and it starts with just understanding and tracking the basic metrics. How many monthly marketing leads did you get? How many monthly sales leads do you get? How many offers are you making to potential clients? Meaning you've had a sales conversation, you've decided it's a good fit. You've talked through pricing. You've actually offered your services to them. 'cause at the level where you're at six figures into multi six figures, you should not be offering your services to every single person that walks in.

Brian: Obviously there should be a standard because the better your clientele, the better you're going to get. But how many offers are you making each month? And then how many of those did you turn into clients? And what's the average client value? If you know all those metrics and you're tracking it religiously, I track mine every single day.

Brian: For you, it could be weekly, at least a once a month, but probably weekly is the best cadence to do every [00:24:00] Friday. Just update your numbers. You can start to optimize this. And the way we optimize this is just looking at the conversion rates between all of those metrics. You have to zoom out because most freelancers, they have their heads stuck in one small thing, and if you don't zoom out, you can't see the big picture.

Brian: So what we do is we look at all the numbers between steps. I'll give you really easy funnel metrics here because this is an audio podcast. Even if you're watching visually, I have no visual for you here. If you're watching on YouTube, for some God known reason, easy math here, a hundred marketing leads per month.

Brian: You get a hundred email addresses a month, 10 of those turn into sales leads. They fill out your inquiry form. Maybe they book a call with you. Five of those are offers made, So you have a hundred monthly marketing leads. That means that a hundred people gave you their email address at some point during the month.

Brian: 10 of those. Turn into sales leads. That's a 10% conversion rate between marketing leads to sales leads We'll talk about if that's good or bad or not, but you get 10 of those into sales leads. That means they've expressed interest in hiring you in some way, shape, or form. All those 10 who express interest in hiring you, you offered your services to five of them That means from 10 to five, you lost five people in that. And it could be that you looked at the inquiry form and you just knew straight off that three of those were bad fits. You rejected those and then. The other seven you [00:25:00] actually talked to, and two of those after conversations, you decided this is not a good fit.

Brian: I don't think we're the right fit. here's some other people that might be better for you. So you actually offered your services to five of those. So that is a 50% conversion from sales leads to offers made. And then you closed two clients, let's say 40% conversion rate between offers made and closed clients.

Brian: And then your average client value $5,000. That means you're making 10 grand a month if scale that up KA year. Then we just look at the thing and figure out which one of these numbers needs to increase. Is it the 10%, the 50%, or the 40%? In this case, I know because I've looked at hundreds of businesses at this point, and myself included, I know that the conversion rate between marketing leads and sales leads should be closer to 20 to 25% or more.

Brian: In some cases, I've seen 30 or 40 or 50% in certain offers, in certain niches. So if you just get up to 20%, you have that same a hundred marketing leads. And you, instead of getting 10 sales leads, you're going to get 20 sales leads. And if you get those 20 sales leads at the same 50% conversion rate, you make offers to 50% of those, you're gonna have 10 offers made.

Brian: If you still close 40% of those, you're gonna have four clients. And if you start at 5,000, average [00:26:00] client value, you're gonna be at 20,000 a month. Congrats. Multi-six figure business. It's rarely that clean, but that is the example of optimizing. Usually you're gonna get that conversion rate up, right? And then you're gonna find out that your sales conversion rate drops, and now you need to focus on getting your sales conversion rate.

Brian: You need to work on your sales process, how overcome objections. Now I'm tapped out on time. Because at a certain point, you're gonna hit your time limit. Now I need to start increasing rates, or I need to hire a team, some other bottleneck in your business.

Brian: But you need to focus on one thing at a time to optimize and not try to juggle multiple at a time because you just don't have the bandwidth. Solo entrepreneurs, even if you have a small team like me I just don't have the bandwidth to juggle multiple optimizations at the same time. it's also when you're doing multiple things at the same time, it's hard to see how one can affect the other, because if you were messing with your conversion rate between marketing leads and sales leads, and you're messing with your sales conversion process.

Brian: You see our sales conversion process drop? Was it because you got more leads at the top of the funnel, or was it because the new sales process sucks? You see how that can start to mess with you? So focus on one thing at a time to optimize.

Brian: So that's the demand engine in a nutshell. There's a lot that goes into this. [00:27:00] Automate as much as humanly possible, make it as simple as possible for you as you scale, because you're gonna have less and less time. But if you're at the point where you're at high five figures, low six figures, you wanna scale to multi six figures and you want our help.

Brian: Again, me and myself and my team, we have done this many times. The two coaches we have right now taking clients on one has a, agency right at 500 KA year that he's currently running. While being a coach is a team that runs it for him. And then the other coach there's taking clients right now, he's the one that built his agency to three point something million a year and sold it and then helped double two more companies to that level.

Brian: So we have a couple clients that are multi six figures now, trying to get to seven figures, put 'em on his roster. If you're at low six figures, one ticket to multi-six figures, either coach would work, But just go to six figure creative.com/coaching. Fill out the short questionnaire and we'll see if it's a fit for you.

Brian: And just like I talked about in this exact episode, we don't approve every person who applies. We approve half or less than half at this point. And then everyone we talk to, we don't offer our services to, we offer around, Three outta four people, we talk to our services. That means one out of four that we talk to we just decide are [00:28:00] not a good fit and we don't make an offer to you.

Brian: the reason we do that is because we don't wanna get people who are a bad fit In the coaching program, it is much easier for us to help somebody to go from six figures to multiple six figures than it is for us to help someone go from zero to a hundred K. It is much easier. You already have all the things in place.

Brian: So if that is you. Then you are a good fit. Go to six figure creative.com/coaching. See you there. That is it for this episode of the six Figure Creative Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on next week's episode. We'll tackle the next in the series for the multi six Figure Freelance Playbook.