Designing A Service That Scales | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

357. The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Playbook pt 2

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Brian: [00:00:00] for any freelancers out there that are trying to break through that multi six figure income level, and you've been stuck maybe at high five figures, low six figures, you know, a hundred, 125, $150,000 a year.

Brian: Those people, I've rarely seen the thing holding them back actually be marketing issues. If anything, you actually have too many clients and not enough time at that level.

Brian: And normally when you have too many clients and not enough time, the easy fix that I tell people to do is just raise your rates. In many cases, that will decrease the amount of clients that you have giving you more time back. But rate increase offsets that so you end up making roughly the same amount of money, but working less time so you can then take on clients and you'll hit some other kind of max at your business.

Brian: The problem with that is, at a certain level that stops working. Every single niche, every single industry has an upper limit that you can charge in your niche. Before people just say no. And at a certain point, when your rates get too high, the more people you quote high rates to, the more people say No, you're gonna start eventually having no clients and lower income, which is not obviously what we wanna do if we're trying to break through the multiple six figure income plateau.

Brian: I. So if marketing's not the issue, holding you back for multi-six figures and just raising your rates isn't the answer. What's [00:01:00] the thing holding you back? It's generally from the people that I've worked with and the people that I've seen and the people that I've consulted, it is generally issues around the offer itself.

Brian: Most freelancers at this level they're good at what they do. You, don't make it to six figures without being good at what you do. Usually great at what you do. You're usually a pretty good people person. Like the personality issues aren't there generally at that level. It's not just straight up pricing issues, like I said, but it's usually some sort of offer issue that's holding you back.

Brian: So when I say offer issue, I'm talking about how most freelancers are stuck in these, custom projects. Every single project is this unique bespoke custom thing because as creatives, we guided this because we're uber creative people. We love creativity. We love to just reinvent the wheel every time we work on a project.

Brian: While that's great to fulfill us creatively, it puts a real limit on what we can earn. And if you ever are trying to break through that plateau that you're stuck at because you have no time and you have tons of clients, but you can't break through the income plateau, the only real solution is to work on your offer strategy.

Brian: When every single proposal that you do is this custom bespoke proposal that turns into chaos, you're quoting from scratch every single time, takes too much time to quote, You end up pricing [00:02:00] based on how long it's gonna take or what feels fair, versus having a strategic approach to pricing that's gonna first give you good cash flow and good revenue.

Brian: And so you're stuck on this consistent delivery treadmill because custom projects usually turn into chaos at some point, even if it's not chaos, it's still something that's hard to reign in and scale because every single thing looks different. There's no uniformity between what you're doing from project to project.

Brian: You're also limited on how high your rates can go because there is no value framework around what value you provide. So your pricing is just hard to gauge on what the upper limit could or should be because you're not really solving a clear problem to a clear avatar over and over again on repeat.

Brian: Or you're just stuck in an niche where there's no upper pricing room where you can't raise your rates anymore. Your marketing ends up being confusing this jumbled mess because you're trying to do sometimes a lot of different services for a lot of different clients.

Brian: So it's not really clear what problem you're actually solving at the end of the day, you're not known for anything because you're known for everything.

Brian: And the bottom line is you're just stuck in this reactive mode. You're reacting to the chaos of being successful. Six figures as a freelancer is successful, no matter what anyone says.

Brian: You can listen to Alex Moseys [00:03:00] in the world and to build your business to a hundred million dollars a year, you can feel like a failure. But if you make it to six figures, I call that a success. You are good at what you do, but at that level becomes that first level of chaos you're just reacting to everything.

Brian: And I understand it 'cause I've been there. I've come from experience with this. But the way to get outta that is through intentionality, having an intentional approach to everything that you do. so instead, I wanna propose that you build out what I would just call a flagship offer.

Brian: And we'll talk about what the definition of that is, how to do it in this episode. But just think through a flagship offer. I'm putting my flag in the ground and saying, this is the thing I'm known for. This is the thing. I'm going to build everything around in my business. And if you can do that the people who have done that the best are the ones that I have seen go to multiple six figures, half a million, 750,000.

Brian: Even as a solo freelancer, I've seen one or two go to seven figures, which is crazy to think about

Brian: because a well thought out, flagship offer allows you to separate your time from your services. So the money you're earning is not directly associated with how much time you're spending on it. You can build systems around all the projects you're working on versus everything feeling like chaos.

Brian: And with all this, you can create crystal clear messaging that makes it easy for [00:04:00] people to say yes to you because it's clear what you're going to do for them, and and ultimately keep delivery AKA your time from being the bottleneck.

Brian: Time is usually the bottleneck that's holding you about for multi six figures. So if we can eliminate that bottleneck, then we can go back to marketing as the issue we got to solve for most clients. if this is your first time ever listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube for whatever reason you're watching hi.

Brian: I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. We take a lot of influence from a lot of different industries, a lot of different people, and bring it into the podcast so that we are learning from what other people are doing versus just staying in our own little tight knit circles and only looking over to our left and to our right, just to see what our immediate neighbors are doing, which is a horrible way to run your business.

Brian: If you want outside influence, that is the way to run your business. If that sounds good, this is the place for you. Coming back to your flagship offer, let's first talk about a checklist. Think about like a a diagnostic list. You're doing like a diagnostic on your health or your car or your home or whatever, and you're trying to figure out first, what are the things that are missing.

Brian: what have I not done maintenance-wise in my car? I don't know. What do I need to do with my health here? Think about like a health check. What are all these [00:05:00] should bes or should haves when it comes to a flagship offer? And then whenever you feel yourself missing, one of these things we'll talk through in this episode kind of how to fill that gap or how to fix that.

Brian: So lemme define an offer. Offer is just what service or services? What outcome, what thing are you offering people? In most cases, you think of a mis services. We'll talk about the difference between the two, like a true offer versus just a service you're offering. But it's just what are you offering for money, right?

Brian: this is like a checklist here. Your offer should be first outcome based, not service based. I just, kind of alluded to that. the way most freelancers messes up is, I sell a service. I offer editing services. I offer production services, I offer design services.

Brian: I offer, x, y, and Z services.

Brian: While you can get to six figures selling services, seen it, done it. I understand it. It is not the best way to do it generally. the opposite is owning a problem. When you think through the problem that you are solving people and you own that problem and, you end up creating a better service at the end of the day, a better package, a better offer.

Brian: And I've talked about this way, way back in hundreds of episodes ago in the podcast. I think Kodiak was the example we used on a show where we [00:06:00] talked about solving a problem versus offering a solution. Kodiak is probably now bankrupt. I don't know what they're doing. Somebody can fact check me here.

Brian: They're not doing well, but they're originally a film company, so they offered film. That was their quote service, that was the thing they offered. They were a solution based business. They offered film. And so if you had a camera back before the residual photography, you would use Kodiak film. In almost all cases, I'm old enough to lightly remember having actual film Cameras in my, very young childhood, and I do remember owning and buying Kodiak film, right. the problem was they weren't problem focused. The problem was, I'm trying to capture these memories, right? I'm trying to capture these memories so that I can share them with friends, with family, remember them.

Brian: Look back with nostalgia on those things. And when you think about the problem itself,

Brian: film was one solution to that problem. It wasn't the best solution to that problem, or it might've been the best solution for a while. But eventually, digital photography came out, and again, someone can fact check me here, but I believe Kodiak or someone at Kodiak was the first person to invent the digital camera, and they essentially just brushed it off or swept it aside because they saw it as something that [00:07:00] could upset their industry instead of embracing it.

Brian: Blockbuster was the same way. You can say the exact same argument with Blockbuster versus Netflix. were too focused on the solution. they had sunk cost bias behind all the, infrastructure and money they'd put into offering this one solution versus just being focused on the problem itself, the problem they were trying to solve.

Brian: And if you look at it now, digital photography has essentially destroyed Kodiak's business.

Brian: Netflix has utterly destroyed Blockbuster to the point where I believe the last blockbuster in America is on Airbnb. Now, you can say it as a fun little blast from the past.

Brian: So when you own a problem, you are willing to pivot to something that's a better solution for people. Instead of offering this service, you offer that service. Are you bundle a package of services together to better solve the problem for the client and the more expensive the problem is that you're solving for your clients, the more you can charge.

Brian: Hands down, bottom line when it comes to pricing, when it comes to getting paid what you're worth, the more expensive, the more painful the problem for the client, the more you're gonna get paid

Brian: I've talked about in the podcast before that how your, the closer your services to the money. The more you can generally charge, because money is a very [00:08:00] important thing in any business if you're in B2B especially. So if you are doing motion graphics, for example, and you're creating graphics for product launches, that's something that's very close to the money and that's why motion graphics designers can be paid 20, 30, $50,000 or more to do a product launch for people.

Brian: Because the other solution to that is product photography, which can be very expensive. If you have to make changes last minute on projects because of design changes or something, then you have to do another shoot. And that can be really expensive for put a product launch behind schedule. That stuff is a huge problem, especially when you have a team of people behind it and a whole marketing department.

Brian: Like I mean, think through how big of a problem that can be and when you can tie, again, you tie your motion graphic service to something that is, that close to the money, the product launch. it's a very valuable thing. I will do the opposite of that now and talk about how something that's not a very expensive problem or something that's not very close to the money.

Brian: And that's something from my background, which is music production. Music production is very much an aspirational thing. There is very rarely a financial incentive behind the music being recorded. unless, if you're at the highest levels, if you are the one recording [00:09:00] Taylor Swift's album, she's gonna make a lot of money from that.

Brian: You can probably make a lot of money from recording or producing her, but in most cases, when you're working with pro Sumer bands, like I would call my band, I used to be in a, a metal band. We were signed, we toured we did the whole thing. But money was not our motive. We were just doing it because that was a thing we wanted to do.

Brian: It was very passion driven. And because of that, we were very money conscious. We were very tight with our budgets when it came to recording.

Brian: And in the grand scheme of things, that was not where we made our money anyways. We made our money on tour selling merchandise.

Brian: So again, the more expensive the problem is to the client. The more you can charge, the closer you are to the money, the more you can usually charge, the more you can make, but also the fewer people who were actually able to solve the problem well, the more you can charge. That was one of the things that set me apart was I could solve the problem better than the next person.

Brian: I had a better set of skills from mixing and mastering the genre of music that I was in than most people could. I was more meticulous when it came to producing and recording and editing musicians so I could solve the problem better than the next person.

Brian: but there were still three or four or five people in the US my clients could go to, to get a similar or better result for [00:10:00] the same or maybe slightly higher, maybe even slightly lower price.

Brian: no, this goes obviously back to the Red Ocean versus the Blue Ocean strategy. We have a podcast episode on this episode 339. How Freelancers Can win without competing on Price. It was, I called it the Blue Ocean Trio. So if this is something you're struggling with, go back to that episode. Just go to 600 creative.com/ 3 3 9 to get that episode.

Brian: But let's zoom back out now again. We're on a checklist for your offer, and we're trying to diagnose what are the things that might be wrong with your current offer. First one was, you own a problem. You don't just own a service. You're outcome focused. You're not solution focused. You are not Kodiak, you are the digital camera.

Brian: You are not Blockbuster, you are Netflix.

Brian: the second item on this offer diagnosis kind of checklist here is what you offer is clear. It's not fluffy. This is another problem. I see time and time and time and time again. If you have to use fluffy cotton candy language to explain what it is that you do, how you help people, what you offer, what problem you solve.

Brian: If you have to put a lot of like flowery, fruity language in there to do that, You're at a disadvantage. Donald Miller is the one who've I think made this quote famous, which is probably someone else's [00:11:00] quote, but if you confuse, you lose it is from the book StoryBrand, which fun fact Donald Miller, his office is right down the street from my house. I walk by it all the time.

Brian: He drives a,

Brian: believe a silver Porsche cayenne for ucar people.

Brian: But one of the biggest struggles that we have with our clients when it comes to mapping out the offer and creating your messaging is getting people to just say in plain language what it is that you do, how you help people. If you have to butter it up with a bunch of like fluffy words, either you're not clear enough or you're not solving a, big enough problem for it to be a standalone value and of itself, right?

Brian: Like for us. The thing that we help people with the most in our coaching program is we help you get clients. The problem solve is feast your famine, roller coaster up and down. No consistent clients always relying on word of mouth. These are all problems that we help solve, and we own that. And that's the only thing we really focus on when people, yes, there's other things we help with within the program, but the core reason we help people is to get consistent.

Brian: Clients.

Brian: Notice that my messaging here was not how, with 20 years of experience and a team of experienced professional next level coaches, [00:12:00] it's terrible language. But if you confuse, you lose. This is just an area where if you feel like you can't explain what it is that you do in a clear, concise way, this is something you need to focus on.

Brian: The third checklist item on this diagnosis checklist is. your service. Your flagship service should be transformational, not incremental.

Brian: Another way of saying this is, it is not button seat. You're not a button seat service provider. You are somebody that is like a trusted consultant, somebody that has taken someone through a full transformation. So usually you don't make it to six figures as a button seat freelancer. It can happen, but it's, it's unusual to happen. Usually you are offering some sort of transformation to your clients or a complete service to your clients, a complete outcome to your clients. Take it to this level. So this one's not as big of a deal for most people, but if you happen to be a button seat freelancer, you're offering a service that I can just go find on Fiverr and put another button in the seat yeah, I'm looking at the reviews and yeah, I'm looking at your portfolio, but like it all looks the same at a certain point.

Brian: I'm just picking a butt that's got good reviews, has a good portfolio, and putting that button in the seat, right? If that's you and you've made it to six figures and you're trying to get to multi-six figures first of all, you're likely not gonna do it on Fiverr, although there is a path forward on Fiverr.

Brian: If you are great with systems.

Brian: [00:13:00] But generally the only way to do this is to scale with, people.

Brian: That's where it's, a button seat service. It's usually lower value. It can be productized, which is great, but to get past that six figure into the multi-six figure range, you've gotta scale with people. The problem is, most of the button seat services that I've seen do not have the profit margins necessary in order to hire a team out effectively, unless you go like, do the geo arbitrage thing and hire somebody in the Philippines or South America or Eastern Europe.

Brian: Transformational services are usually the only reliable path to multi six figures at least,

Brian: though you might be able to crack low, just over 200,000 with a button seat kind of service. I have seen that happen, although it is rare, and the person that did it was incredible with systems to the point where I don't think many people have that skillset. And also, if his skillset would've been deployed in any other business, he would've probably been a millionaire.

Brian: So anyways, so that is the third kind of checkpoint here in this diagnostic checklist is your flagship offer is transformational, not incremental.

Brian: Next on the checklist here is it's repeatable. Something you can actually systemize if you have this problem that I see so many freelances to struggle with, especially the ones that we work with. The problem of, I struggle to come up with a flat rate [00:14:00] pricing because there are so many variables. If that is you, if you can't create a flat rate pricing for your service, because there are so many changing variables of things that the client could add, or could have, or could need, or could want, then you're doing it wrong.

Brian: And that is the only caveat is this, unless you are in a very high value niche, if you're charging 40, $50,000 for a project, obviously you have a lot of room to customize and be super bespoke and not be very productized. But if you're like most freelancers and you're not that five to 15 to even $20,000 a year range, it's gotta be productized.

Brian: And obviously if you just do the math and you realize this $20,000 project I can only take on five of them per year because it takes so much time, if that's the case, absolutely has to be productized, has to be repeatable. Something that you can build systems around.

Brian: so unless you are ultra high ticket. It's gotta be something that's repeatable, something that you can turn into a system to get the same outcome every time and over and over and over and over again. remember, we're solving problems for clients. The more expensive the problem, the more you can charge.

Brian: So if you're trying to solve a problem, you've gotta have a systematic approach to solving that problem over and over and over [00:15:00] again for your clients. And if you struggle to find a systematic way to solve the problem over and over again for your clients, the other issue could be that you are trying to solve it for too many types of clients.

Brian: I've seen this also where you have, let's just say websites. You're creating a website for all you web designers watching or listening, probably listening. We don't have any watchers compared to listeners. For web designer,

Brian: that is the ultimate productized service. Unless you create websites in the e-commerce space for Shopify, and you do WooCommerce and you do websites on WordPress 'cause that's what your clients want and you do websites and. Squarespace and you do it for doctors and for lawyers and for roofers, and you do it for health and wellness businesses, and you do it for course creators and coaches, and you do it for you see the point here, like every single one of these people and these, sorts of variables you put in adds complexity to the project.

Brian: So even something that is very systemizable, it's very repeatable, utterly falls apart when you're trying to serve too many niches at once.

Brian: but when you specialize in, you're creating, let's just say Shopify stores. For people transitioning off of Etsy Again, I dunno if that's a niche even worth it, but [00:16:00] I'm just saying that's an example of, it's a pretty standardized process.

Brian: So the final checklist on this diagnostic for a good flagship offer that's scalable is something that's actually structured, an offer that's structured for leverage. And lemme kind of talk about an unleveraged offer versus a leveraged offer. Then I'll give you some actual some more practical stuff within what this means.

Brian: Leverage is a weird word to use, especially in the creative world, but it's, it's really important. An unleveraged offer is basically saying, I'll do whatever the client wants, however long it takes for a custom price that I make up on the fly that is very unleveraged. Very hard to scale, that is where you're running around with like a chicken with your head cut off everywhere you go.

Brian: A leverage offer is I solve a specific problem for a specific type of client through a proven repeatable system, and I charge accordingly.

Brian: And a leverage offer, the client fits the system not the other way around. Last week, I talked about on on the first episode in the series I talked about how you work with clients. You don't work for clients, how you're not an employee, you're an expert, an expert's lead not follow.

Brian: When you have that mindset you fundamentally understand that when you're solving a problem and you're the expert at solving that problem, and clients are [00:17:00] hiring you because they trust you to solve that problem, it should make sense that your client fits into that system that you've created. Not, I will create the system around the client because they are the experts and I'm here to work for them because I'm the employee.

Brian: That doesn't work. It's a very low value position to be in, very hard business to be a part of. And I've seen this also with multiple people, my wife included with her past freelance career where it was more of a boss employee relationship. the big line drawn is where, as a freelancer, if someone hires you and you have to work within their systems, their software, you're not a freelancer, you are an employee.

Brian: You might be a part-time employee, it might not be a legal employee, but you are an employee of that company.

Brian: Whereas if you're a true freelancer and you are a true expert at what you do, your clients work within your systems. They operate in your world because you are the expert for what it is that you do.

Brian: I cannot imagine trying to scale a business to multiple six figures while working within what the clients want, the client's desires. Obviously their input matters. Obviously what they desire matters. However,

Brian: we have over 200 clients that we [00:18:00] help with client acquisition. We have over 200 active clients paying us right now, and we recently had a client come on, bigger company, multi seven figure company, wanting us to help them with client acquisition. It's a big company at that point. They want us to work within their systems.

Brian: Us in their Slack channels, helping them collaborate, not something they offer, especially at the price point that we offer it at. We do not have the price point that supports that sort of thing. I cannot work within their systems. It would destroy everything that we do to have one client over here in all 200 over there.

Brian: So made it clear, if you are part of what we do, you work within our systems. Had a very good clarifying conversation with them and now they're in all of our systems doing it the way that the other 200 clients are doing it.

Brian: because we've built it in a way that is leveraged. So let's talk about leverage and what that looks like in a few different ways. I kind of hate this word, but it's necessary and for all you people that hate the word to, I'm sorry,

Brian: but there's four types of leverage or four different types of leverage that I wanna talk about when it comes to structuring. The services you're offering for your clients, there's systems leverage. for example, like let's just say you've already built out like 80% of the deliverables through templates or repeatable frameworks, and then all you're doing [00:19:00] is you're putting the client in, you do the last 20% that custom work using custom work in parentheses custom work.

Brian: And then that solves the problem for the client. That's an example of systems leverage. You have systemized 80% of it and then you were customizing the last 20% to get the client over the hump.

Brian: Another way of doing this, and I talked about this a few weeks ago in the podcast episode 354 why perfectionism is Killing Your Income, where I talked about that $92 an hour freelancer versus the $462 an hour freelancer.

Brian: this is the other way of creating systems leverage. If you've streamlined every single part of the delivery so that a 5K project takes six hours instead of 25 hours,

Brian: maybe it's not templates, maybe it's not 80% done, but you can take every single client for the process faster than the other people you've done it through. Again, our Easy Ates framework, which is you've eliminated the stuff that should never be done. You've automated anything that can be every single step that can be automated.

Brian: You have

Brian: delegated any of the lower value tasks that eat up your time, but give you no real value, and you have mitigated any of the problems that you have to do or the things that you have to do that you can't just pass off to someone else. Mitigating just means [00:20:00] make it suck less for you.

Brian: another example of systems Leverage is just creating clear boundaries. Clear boundaries especially with a productized service, can avoid scope creep.

Brian: It can avoid clients stepping on things they shouldn't step on eating up time where they shouldn't eat up time. these are all part of systems boundaries and systems kinda go hand in hand. The second type of leverage is pricing leverage. One of the types of pricing leverages that you can have is just an insanely premium, high value service.

Brian: When I talk about high ticket services, where you're charging 50 grand for, what is it you do, that's where you have a lot more room to just be more custom, be more, more spoke, be more of the creative that you want to be. As long as you're really solving the problem for your client, I'm not gonna pretend that every single problem in the world can be solved with a systemized, productized approach.

Brian: is not what I'm saying. However, the last thing you wanna do is be in a low value niche like music production, where every single client is coming to you and you're doing every single thing from scratch.

Brian: You are writing the songs with your clients from scratch. You are deciding every single mic selection from scratch, every single instrument, selection from scratch, every single string selection from scratch, every single amp and tone from scratch. Every single beat is made from scratch. Every single drum sample is chosen from [00:21:00] scratch or drum head tuned. Mike, put all these things. If you're doing all of these things from scratch for very low value clients that are paying you low, thousands of dollars, it's not a very good business model to be in.

Brian: And that kills the creative in you. I know it kills the creative in you. The problem is clients come for the results, not necessarily how you get there. Especially when the services you're offering do not involve the clients. Obviously there's an experiential element and you can sell a really cool experience in an environment like that, but they're not buying all of this bespoke crap that just really strokes your ego or gets you off as a creative.

Brian: When it comes to like, I love tone selection process. I love X, Y, and Z. That is a place that's gonna keep you stuck where you're at.

Brian: And so if you're offering that level of premium service without the premium price to go with it, you're gonna be stuck forever. Last thing when it comes to pricing leverage is kinda just recurring retainers. Recurring retainers are great pricing leverage because the money is automatic, it's coming to you every month you're getting paid usually ahead of the month.

Brian: So you're getting really good cash flow as well. Third is time leverage. This is where you're using time to your [00:22:00] advantage for. Making things more efficient. Example strategy sessions or VIP days where you generate high revenue in a very focused sprint. Another example of that is like a website in a week.

Brian: I've seen clients in the web design space offer like a website in a week. That eliminates a lot of the back and forth and hassle of doing long-term web design projects. you can get usually a high amount of money in a very short amount of time. Another time leverage type thing is licensing or templated deliverables that you sell again and again and again. This is really tough, but it can work. We had a guest on the podcast. Whew. It's been a while. Cat co collet back in episode 215. how to Earn up to $500,000 per hour As a designer. Talk about a multi six figure creative right there. long story short, go back and listen to that episode.

Brian: It's fine. Episode two 15. She designs cool stuff and then it's licensed by big stores like, target. She has her stuff in Target, right? very tough to make that model work, but she essentially created one design, took her an hour or less that one design has generated over half a million dollars for her.

Brian: That's where the title comes from, the episode. Pretty crazy.

Brian: another example of time leverage is asynchronous workflows, [00:23:00] meaning you never really interface with a client face to face. It's every, all done asynchronously meaning like. You send something to the client, they review it, they send it back for revisions, you do the revisions and back and forth and back and forth.

Brian: this is one of the ways that design joy. He's kind of known for, I don't know what he's doing at this point, but he's kinda known as the person who pioneered the unlimited design model that you've seen a lot of people doing. If you're in the design space, you've probably heard of him.

Brian: He does all of his stuff with asynchronous workflows. in that world, he has, created a bottleneck in his delivery flow through this asynchronous back and forth by putting expectations on revisions and time and delivery time on things. So I'm not gonna get into the details of that business model, but generally, the reason he's able to earn seven figures as a freelancer is because he has recurring revenue every month coming in.

Brian: Clients are paying him monthly. It's very high premium monthly service. I think it's like four or five, six grand a month, something like that. And the unlimited design I'm putting in air quotes is because clients send in requests through, his built in system the design proposals that he has them fill out.

Brian: And then he does the design and delivers it within 48 hours, creating a [00:24:00] natural bottleneck. And then if there's revisions to be done, he does those within 24 or 48 hours. And so generally he's probably only doing three or four designs a month max with clients, depending on obviously the level of design.

Brian: But that's a good example of time leverage. And then the last type of leverage is people leverage. I've talked about this before. I won't talk too much about it here, but a couple weeks ago I talked about the personal trainer who works out for you, and then you get all the results. You get the, six pack, you get the great cardio, the VO two max goes up et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: Right? This is. Obviously a wonderful thing if that existed, but that's how team members work in a business. They work for you, they do your stuff or things that you want them to do, and then you get all the return from that. You get the profit from that if there's actual margins to support it. But if this is the route you go, it's a great route to multi-six figures into seven figures, wonderful route.

Brian: But you've gotta have consistency everywhere, or you're gonna fall apart. You're gonna be so stressed out. You need consistent, high gross margins, meaning 80% of your revenue you keep, only 20% goes out to the talent that you hire. So when someone pays you a thousand dollars for a project, only 200 that goes out for, the creative to deliver it or help to deliver it.

Brian: If you get paid [00:25:00] $10,000, only 2000 of that goes out or less, 2000 of that or less goes out for fulfillment. So you keep 8,000 of that. That's the only way that works. And some quick math just giving you two examples. If you're making a quarter million dollars a year, so $250,000. You're at 50% margins, which is a lot of what agencies do is like the 50% margins, meaning they will give you half of the project value.

Brian: So you make 250,000 bucks, 125,000, half of that goes out to the team immediately. So you're left with 125,000 bucks. At that point, you also need about 25,000 for marketing 'cause you need consistent clients coming in the door. if you have a team, you have to have Clints coming every month.

Brian: So you need to invest in marketing. $25,000 for tools, for gears, for whatever else is in there means you are taking home about $75,000. In this example. You might as well not even have a team at this point. Why have a team? If you're only taking home $75,000, you can do that as a solo free answer and no problem at all.

Brian: the other example of 80% gross margins, meaning you keep 80% of the project fee you make 250,000 bucks, only 50,000 of that goes to the team. I. $25,000 still goes to marketing. $25,000 still goes to tools, gears, whatever else. That means you have [00:26:00] $150,000 take home pay. That's a lot better.

Brian: That's literally double the take home pay just by having proper gross margins. So you need consistent gross margins. That's the first thing you need. Consistent income. So either consistently getting new clients every month, which is really stressful 'cause you can have down months or consistently keeping clients that you have on monthly recurring revenue, which is the much better way of doing this.

Brian: And then you need consistent cash flow. You need people paying upfront, always here's the worst way to do a team. If you're gonna do a team. The worst way to do a team is every project you're being paid one time and they're gone. So it means you have to get new projects every month to be able to support your team.

Brian: So that's the high stress up and down months can happen. So I don't know how you're gonna pay payroll in a low month. They're paying you. On a net 60. So that means that you deliver the work, you have to pay your team, and then you get paid 60 days later. That's horrible. Never, Never do that.

Brian: So that is the diagnostics checklist. If you hear any noise outside right now, I've got lawn mageddon happening. My uh, lawn care people have decided to show up on Wednesday. They usually come on Tuesdays. Yay. But let's get into kind of the three major elements of a ske offer.

Brian: This is kind of the meat and potatoes of this. Now that you've kind of [00:27:00] diagnosed what it is that's wrong with your offer right now.

Brian: The first of the three elements of a scalable offer is first, it's a flagship offer. Obviously I've talked about this before, but what is a flagship offer? It is a thing you are known for. It's not one of the 30 potential things you could do for a client. It is the one thing you were known for. This could be like branding systems, retainer, content plans, funnel builds.

Brian: It could be story driven campaigns,

Brian: or if you think the opposite is specific problems that you were solving, the things you're known for, basically.

Brian: For us, it's client acquisition. That's the thing I'm known for. It's the thing that we have owned. It is our flagship offer. There's nothing else you can pay me for. We have everything free. The one thing paid,

Brian: A flagship offer needs a clear before and after. An example kind of framework. I've used this in the past on the podcast, but if you're new, this is a good one to kind of try to think through for yourself. Is I help specific client go from pain to outcome in timeline, like whatever the timeline is.

Brian: If

Brian: you can fill that out. It's a good first step, right? Now before you go running off to fill it out. I just wanna give one PSA here Public service announcement. Small business owner. It [00:28:00] is not a specific type of client. The word specific means specific. Small business owner is an industry.

Brian: It is most businesses.

Brian: So when I say specific, I think it needs to be something that the person would identify with. I am a small business owner. I did not identify with that phrase. If someone said, who here's a small business owner, I don't think I would raise my hand.

Brian: The second element of a scalable offer is a delivery structure that scales.

Brian: When it comes to solving a problem, there is multiple ways you can solve a problem. Any problem can be solved a number of ways. for you audio people out there, when you are in your daw, your digital audio workstation, there's like 10 ways to do the same exact thing. There's 10 ways to cut and paste something.

Brian: There's 10 ways to time stretch something. There's 10 ways to get the problem solved, right? It's the same in Photoshop with the same in premier Pro. Every single digital workstation of some sort has like 10 different ways to do the same damn thing. So when it comes to the, service you offer, there's usually 10 different ways to solve the same problem.

Brian: so if there is 10 different ways to solve the same problem. Choose the one that is going to actually be scalable for you. something that supports higher income without the higher stress.

Brian: So productized services, I talk about these all the time. They're wonderful. [00:29:00] It's essentially packaging up a solution to a problem, into a nice product. It's a productized service that you sell as if it's a product. When I buy a pot or a pan from Amazon, do I say, please, Mr. Amazon, please, Mr. All clad.

Brian: Can you customize this pot for me? No. They say, They say, you get this pot, if the pot solves the problem for you, it fries the egg or it boils the water for you. If it solves this problem for you, take it. If not, go get another one. Get something else, right? That is a true productized service.

Brian: It is. This should solve your problem. This solves most people's problems, or it solves a very specific problem for a very specific client. And if you're that client, you're gonna want solution. You, You're not my ideal client, then my solution probably doesn't work well for you.

Brian: So could I help lawyers get clients with our client acquisition stuff? Maybe, but I don't wanna try. I'm not interested in trying to go down that route. What we've created works for creative freelancers. There may be other niches out there that it works for, but I'm not interested in trying to productize for them because they'll have to change the product to suit their needs.

Brian: There will be changes that have to be made, little customizations here and there, and they'll all add up.

Brian: When I did mixing and mastering for heavy metal bands, my very specific niche, I had [00:30:00] every single plugin, every single tool. When I was recording heavy metal bands, I had every single instrument I needed to fulfill in that niche. The very specific baritone guitars, the very specific thick gauge strings to support the low tuning very specific microphones for the aggressive guitars and the vocals, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: That's an example of a product size service. Next is like strategic. Intentions are VIP days. That's a fulfillment model that supports higher income without higher stress. Doing VIP days for your clients retainers recurring revenue. Again, if it's scoped right, if it's not scoped right, this will be more stress than anything else because you'll be forced to deliver ongoing with a client that you're in a than a long-term relationship with, that you're getting underpaid for.

Brian: So that can be also detrimental to your business if that's the case. So if this is scoped right, recurring revenue retainers can be wonderful. A hybrid approach can be really great. We have a few clients doing this to much success where they're doing a blend of strategy and done for you or done for you and done with you kind of blending the two together. Hybrid can be a wonderful fulfillment model. And then last can be like licensing IP or templates for [00:31:00] ongoing use. This can be, again, very difficult. I mention it here because it is a viable way for some people, but generally it's not the kind of route that we work with our clients on. So that's something you're interested in.

Brian: There's probably better people out there to learn from. Maybe Cat Co Collette has some content for you. But templates, selling templates and things are also usually lower ticket if you're trying to sell to individuals. That's also a terrible way to do it. The reason Kat Co makes so much money is because she's not selling her licensed stuff to individuals.

Brian: She's selling it to massive organizations. She's in enterprise sales essentially. So those deals are worth many, many tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for her. Whereas most freelancers I talk to that are talking about scaling through templates, they're trying to sell $20 templates one at a time, not very scalable.

Brian: Almost always can make more money packaging a product I service and scaling that up. So ask yourself this when it comes to delivering. Your service. Can I build processes? Can I build templates? Can I build systems and can I build a team around this? If yes, it's scalable. If you can say yes to all those, it is scalable. And the third part of a good flagship offer is pricing that actually anchors to [00:32:00] value.

Brian: I am not the first, nor will I be the last person to talk to freelancers about value-based pricing. I'm pretty sure Chris Doe has like the definitive video on YouTube. There's a clip that's got like 20 plus million views on YouTube shorts. And the full video on YouTube that has probably another couple million views where he talks about value-based pricing in a very easy to understand way.

Brian: But long story short, it's tied to business outcomes. It's not tied to ours, it is not tied to deliverables. I.

Brian: So a good flagship offer is tied to the value that you provide your clients instead of ours. It is value-based pricing.

Brian: When you look at what we charge our clients, we do value-based pricing. The pricing of what we charge our clients is worth maybe in a year what one or two clients would cover.

Brian: And if what we help you do can't get one or two clients, first of all, we have the ROI guarantee, which means we'll coach you for free until you at least get $10,000 in new clients. Number two If you can't do that, it's usually 'cause you're not doing the work anyways.

Brian: So for the clients that we're able to help get 30, 40, 50 new clients, do you think it's worth paying us what we charge for our services for them? It's an absolute hell yes. Which is why we have many clients stick with us, pass the year, pass [00:33:00] the two year mark into the three year mark. And for those who are wondering, it is a monthly service.

Brian: Cancel any time. So that's value-based pricing. it's when you frame the price around the transformation versus focusing on the service itself. When you sell your service, you should not be talking about all the bells and whistles of your service just focus on the outcome, the problem we solve, the outcome you can provide, whatever the transformation is, Whatever that is worth to them. That is how you price your projects. I.

Brian: So to leave you with some action steps here one challenge for you to do is to just write these things out for your flagship offer or your ideal flagship offer, something that's in alignment with what I talked about in this episode.

Brian: Write out who is the offer for specifically, what's the problem that it solves? What sort of transformation does it deliver? How long does it take and what does it cost? And then ask yourself, how can I deliver this as efficiently as possible, or even increase the price? How can I, again, deliver more efficiently and increase the value that I'm providing so that I can charge more for our clients?

Brian: This is actually where I think chat GBT shines pretty well. I hate, I hate seeing copy written from chat. Bt do not get chat BT to write copy for [00:34:00] you. Don't get grok to write copy for, you don't get any of the AI things out there to write things for you. But when it comes to bring your brainstorming partner to brainstorm ideas to go back and forth on.

Brian: What is my niche? Who could I offer this to? What are specific problems that I could solve around this thing? Oh, I like this. How can I better solve the problem? Asking chat, bt these sorts of things is a wonderful way to get started. However one thing that you're going to get from that, if you do that process, it's a good starting point for anybody.

Brian: Don't get me wrong, it's a good, good, good starting point. The problem with that is it is pulling from a trained set of data, not real experience, that it itself has seen what has worked or what's not worked, right? Does that make sense? Like it's pulling from what it's read on Reddit and scraped from the internet and blog articles and things like that.

Brian: So you gotta, take it with a grain of salt as a good starting point. So if you were looking for that, if you're looking for somebody who can help with trained eyeballs I have people on my team that have scaled agencies to the multimillion dollars. If you want those sorts of people.

Brian: With their eyeballs on your work, telling you based on their experience what in this is great, what is not? What could be [00:35:00] changed. You want an actual brainstorm partner to take what you kind of did with JGBT and level it up. This is something we can help with. Now obviously the offer is something we help everyone with, but it's in service to helping you get more clients.

Brian: 'cause at a certain point when your offer is more scalable and able to scale to that multiple six figure range, that's when it goes back to client acquisition. At a certain point you've opened up your availability because you have a more productized service. You're delivering on less amount of hours, you're getting a good premium rate.

Brian: At a certain point, you're likely going to hit a plateau where you're not, you don't have enough clients to fill up your roster at that point. If that time comes, that's where we help. So if you want our help on this, on mapping out the offer with, trained eyeballs that have seen hundreds of freelancers come through this, and we helped them with that.

Brian: People on my team, again, who've, built multi six figure up to seven figure one of our coaches, biggest agencies that he grew out himself was up to 3.6 million a year. If you want that sort of experience, just go to six figure creative.com/coaching, fill out the short form on that page, and we can chat about whether or not it makes sense for your business.

Brian: we reject at this point over half of our applicants probably closer to [00:36:00] 60%, 65% of our applicants we reject because we either can't help them or they're just, bottom line, we can't help them. For different reasons. Some, it's just wrong industry. We'll let you know. Some, it's a talent level thing.

Brian: Like just don't work with beginners. We prefer to work with people who are experienced, people like you, who maybe you've hit this plateau, 5K, 80 k, a hundred K, 150 k. You wanna get to multiple six figures. That's the people we'd love to help. if that sounds like you go to six figure creative.com/coaching, fill out the short questionnaire and we'll be in touch.

Brian: So that is up for this episode, the six figure creative. That is it for the second part of this multi-part series on the multi six figure freelancer playbook's. A mouthful. We'll be back with you next week on the Part three. So thanks for watching and uh, see you next week.

Brian: Bye.