How To Stop The “Feast Or Famine Cycle”

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[00:00:00] Brian: So I just got back from Alex Ramosi's event in Vegas. at their Acquisition. com headquarters, they have this two day workshop. And they get a bunch of other business owners together and do this in person workshop where we get to spend two days with Alex and Layla and their whole acquisition.

[00:00:13] Brian: com leadership team to fix our businesses basically, or learn and address the issues we have in our businesses. I want to talk about some of the stuff I learned from that today, but if you ever get a chance to go to this, I highly recommend it. You get to essentially spend two full days surrounded by people that are like.

[00:00:29] Brian: Almost everyone in the room is smarter than you. the lowest earning business I saw there was earning a quarter million dollars a year. And it was an 18 year old who's running a landscaping business, which is amazing to me, an 18 year old with a quarter million dollar a year business with a whole team behind him.

[00:00:44] Brian: I was like talking to him and just like, I'm enthralled by listening to this story because like at 18, I don't know about you guys listening to this show, but at 18, I was not running a quarter of a million dollar a year business. I can promise you that. And then like the highest earner besides the people in acquisition.

[00:00:56] Brian: com was like making 10, 15 million a year. So like Being [00:01:00] surrounded by these sorts of people is like so invigorating for me as a business owner, somebody who's been in the game for a long time. The Hormoses and the entire leadership team harped on one big thing over the two days.

[00:01:10] Brian: And that was this, finding bottlenecks in your business and fixing the root cause of those bottlenecks.

[00:01:15] Brian: Now, if you listen back to episode 308, where I talked about how to give yourself a raise in four steps, I I talked about something called the theory of constraints. This is what I learned from Hermoses just through following them on the internet and reading their books over the years.

[00:01:26] Brian: But it's one thing to spot and start to address the bottleneck. It's a completely other thing to actually fix the underlying root cause that's holding you back in your business. And that's ultimately why most of the freelancers I know go through these big Feaster Famine cycles because they never fix the root cause.

[00:01:40] Brian: Even if you are trying to address the issue that's causing the Feaster Famine cycle in your business, if it's not the root cause. It doesn't really fix anything.

[00:01:48] Brian: So whether you're fixing a surface level issue, or you are just doing the spaghetti approach where you get desperate because you're in this famine period for months and you're trying to get out of it, and you're just trying anything under the sun to make it [00:02:00] work,

[00:02:00] Brian: neither one of those approaches fixes anything. Because inevitably what happens is whenever you find your way out of the famine period back into a feast period,

[00:02:07] Brian: you give up on trying to fix whatever problem was there because life gets busy, you have excuses.

[00:02:12] Brian: And so you're just right back there again in a few months So I want to talk today about fixing the root cause of the feast or famine cycle for what I've seen. 95 percent of freelancers. Struggle with and this is a direct thing that I learned from Hermosi himself live in the flesh Last week in Vegas

[00:02:28] Brian: and if you can follow what I talk about in this episode what I learned from the man himself Hermosi then this is going to address the root cause of Feaster famine cycle for 95 percent of freelancers and once you solve this issue business actually gets fun in my opinion You start this positive feedback loop where you realize that you can spot a problem in your business, you can take steps to address the root cause, you can fix the issue, and then you get to reap the rewards of fixing that issue, and that causes this spiral upwards this positive feedback loop where now, what else can I fix in my business?

[00:02:55] Brian: This is actually fun. Now, again, going back to Alex Hermosi's podcast is called the [00:03:00] game because the game of business is perpetual. It's never ending. It's the infinite game. And when you look at it like a game, something that's fun, something has levels involved with it, something that has problems we have to overcome and consequences if we don't overcome those problems and rewards if we do overcome those problems.

[00:03:14] Brian: When you realize it is sort of a game, at least parts of it,

[00:03:17] Brian: it allows you to take control. It's a very powerful thing. Take control of your business and actually make positive change. Instead of being the victim who just kind of gets dragged along with whatever micro or macroeconomics are happening or whatever excuse in your life that's holding you back from having your business and having it the way you want it to be and addressing any of the root cause issues because it's someone else's fault or some external thing that you don't have control over, that sounds miserable to me.

[00:03:38] Brian: That sounds powerless. So if you are the type of person who wants to take control, who takes power back in their business and wants to actually win this game of business, which there's no really winning, but there's small wins along the way, And obviously in Feast or Famine for good, then this episode for you, If you're new to this show this podcast is for you. If you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services and you want to earn more from your creative skills without selling your soul. If that's [00:04:00] you, this is the podcast for you. And this is honestly the episode for you.

[00:04:02] Brian: so let's talk about potential root causes for Feast or Famine. I've got three potential root causes that might be the issue in your business. And the first one is you might have truly a seasonal business. This is very few people, but people in like the wedding industry, you literally do have a seasonal business spring and fall are the big peak seasons and then summer, and especially winter are the big valleys.

[00:04:22] Brian: If this is your business, then this isn't your episode for you. in those sorts of businesses, the only thing you can do is just find things to do in the off seasons. That's basically it. Like earlier, when I talked about that 18 year old running the quarter million dollar a year business doing landscaping, that's That's a seasonal business.

[00:04:34] Brian: I think he did mulching specifically. It was like even more niche. And 12 weeks a year is the actual work where he's making all that money the rest of the year, really nothing to do. So in that case, he can expand other services that are in the fall do raking and the summer do, mowing yards or whatever.

[00:04:48] Brian: He, can find things to do in the meantime. That's your option if you are experiencing a true seasonal industry, but for most freelancers, this isn't the issue. The second potential root cause of feast or famine is a [00:05:00] retention issue. And when I say retention, it's like, how long does a client stay with you?

[00:05:03] Brian: This is. Especially for recurring revenue or retainer based freelancers. I had a podcast episode on this back in episode three oh six offering recurring subscriptions as a freelancer, the holy grail of freelancing. And then I'll follow that up with episode three oh seven, the pricing strategies for recurring subscription freelance clients.

[00:05:20] Brian: It's a mouthful. Well, In that episode, if you did move to that, side, it can create some real stability, but you can still have wild swings in income with feast or famine. And If you're unable to keep clients on your roster paying you month over month, where let's just say if you have a 10 percent churn rate, meaning one out of 10 clients cancels every month, you can start to see how you're going to have these swings.

[00:05:38] Brian: A recurring subscription based freelance business only really works if clients stay with you for seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 months. Preferably or more.

[00:05:46] Brian: That's not the issue that I've seen for most freelancers. So I'm not going to talk about that in this episode. The third root cause what's holding you back and keeping you in this feast or famine cycle

[00:05:55] Brian: is lack of leads. This is again, 95 percent of freelancers. This is the root [00:06:00] cause. You don't have enough lead flow. Most freelancers that I've talked to and that I've worked with and I've seen over the years, and it's been hundreds or thousands, most freelancers only generating one to 10 new leads per month,

[00:06:10] Brian: and that's Many people listening to the show right now or watching us on YouTube are likely in that same boat, one to 10 new leads a month.

[00:06:17] Brian: That's actually a really big range. And I've seen most people, they will swing from 10 leads in a month to one lead in a month, sometimes even zero new leads in a month. that's like a 10 X swing, a 10 times swing from the lowest month to the highest month, which is really crazy.

[00:06:31] Brian: When I looked at my own business, we generate an average of 1, 974 leads every month. The low isover the last year is sixteen hundred and seventy six leads the high over the last year is 2285 new leads and that's only a 30 percent variance from month to month from the lowest to the highest

[00:06:46] Brian: and that is one of the reasons why there's stability in this specific business

[00:06:50] Brian: So when it comes to this lack of leads as the root cause behind your business's feast or famine cycles, I want to talk about what I learned from Alex Ramosi on lead generation specifically, and how freelancers can [00:07:00] take advantage of something that we use in our own business to generate that many leads.

[00:07:03] Brian: And that is paid ads.

[00:07:04] Brian: And before you like turn this episode off or go watching their YouTube video or whatever, let me just say something. Freelancers have been sleeping on paid ads. And if you need proof of this, Alex Ramosi himself is somebody that you should look to because he has one of his earlier companies the acquisition.

[00:07:18] Brian: com portfolio It's a niche photography studio and they use paid ads. With that business and they've grown it to over 50 million per year. Think about that for a second. 50 million a year, multiple studios. All relying on paid ads as the number one driver of new leads.

[00:07:34] Brian: And the reason he's been able to do that is because he doesn't have this limiting belief, this false belief in his head, that freelancers, photographers, or really any other creative freelance niche. He doesn't have this limiting belief saying that it doesn't work in our industry, right? Every freelancer thinks that this doesn't work in their industry.

[00:07:49] Brian: you have people like Alex Ramosi. Who know how to make paid ads work? They know they should work and he doesn't have these like false beliefs in his head holding him back from even trying And the result of that is scaling a photography [00:08:00] business to 50 million dollars a year

[00:08:02] Brian: by the way, the last I heard of this company they had something like 30 locations that they've opened up since Alex took them on under acquisition.

[00:08:08] Brian: com. So let me talk about what I learned from him when it comes to paid ads and how to actually make these work for you as a freelancer. And the first thing is just learning the basic technical side. Of the best ads platform in the world by far for freelancers is meta ads. Meta ads is all about demand creation while things like Google ads are about demand harvesting and demand harvesting is More of a commoditized game.

[00:08:29] Brian: I don't want to talk about on this show. It's not really what we talk about here It's where you are showing up in ads where people are searching for certain things so somebody's looking for like photographer Nashville or Videographer Nashville like these generic terms. It's not really what we do. It's not really what we teach not really what I follow It's not really what I've seen her mosey and his team do they do what's called demand creation, which is interruption ads, meta ads, videos, things that come up and say, I can make use of that.

[00:08:51] Brian: Or, Oh, that's interesting. That's the approach he advocates for. That's what we advocate for. It's what we use. It's what he uses in almost all the portfolio companies that he talked about.

[00:08:58] Brian: And it starts with just understanding [00:09:00] the technical parts of that platform. It's not that hard. There's actually a free video. We're going to link in our show notes page at six figure creative. com slash three one To on that page. There's a video by a YouTuber named Ben Heath. He's just a guy who's known for Facebook ads on YouTube He has like an hour long guide is very solid They'll talk you through Many if not most of the technical things you need to know to get started onmeta ads or Facebook ads is another way Putting it by the way meta if you didn't know this owns Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp and some other properties as well.

[00:09:31] Brian: so go watch that tutorial. It's like an hour long in an hour. You'll know more than most people advertising on Meta. That's the funny thing. And honestly, that part's not that important. Checking a few boxes. turning on a few settings. It's setting up a few things on the back end with your website.

[00:09:43] Brian: It's nothing crazy. Horribly difficult. If, you find that part difficult, then you've got to learn how to overcome obstacles in your business. And if you want to be a freelancer, that's part of the job is problem solving, but that's not the hard part. Just get the basic structure, the basic targeting stuff, right on meta ads, And you're good to go there. The big part is the actual ads [00:10:00] themselves. This is a quote that I wrote down from acquisition. com's head of marketing. And if you don't know let me just explain the structure of acquisition. com acquisition. com is owned by Alex and Layla Hermosi. Alex is an author. He's got a hundred million dollar offers, a hundred million dollar leads. He's got a massive YouTube channel, massive following on social media, sold a boatload of books. Layla, his wife is basically the one who actually runs the show.

[00:10:22] Brian: She's the real CEO. She's also got a large following on social media and they have a leadership team underneath them that are like directly Reporting to Alex and Leo. They have the head of marketing, head of sales, brand or director of brand and a few other kind of leadership roles that I can't remember.

[00:10:38] Brian: The director of marketing is the guy who's responsible for running all the ads for acquisition. com and managing all the ads for their portfolio companies that are doing 250 million a year. So he's directly responsible for well over a million dollars a month in ad spend. So when someone like that.

[00:10:55] Brian: Says something to me. I tend to pay attention. he spent more money every month than I've [00:11:00] probably ever spent in my life on ads

[00:11:01] Brian: So his quote is this Creative is the new targeting and what that quote means is the actual creative the ad you create the video or image and all the copy Or words associated with that that is now how you target on meta many people I know do no targeting on meta at all. They do what's called wide open, they will advertise the entire United States or United States, UK Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, they'll pick kind of like the big five or six countries, just do wide open targeting and let the ad itself target for them.

[00:11:31] Brian: So when that's the case, all the other stuff doesn't really matter. If people can make profitable ads doing no targeting on meta And just letting the algorithm on meta platforms put the ad in front of the right people, which does work. That shows you how much the ad matters.

[00:11:44] Brian: And so when you look at the average business owners method for putting up new ads on meta for advertising, this is what the average business owner does. And I'm guilty of this myself. This is what I used to do. I and other people would test three to five ads to see what works best.

[00:11:56] Brian: Take the winner, try to scale it up, get a mediocre ROI, create a [00:12:00] few more ads to kind of refresh things,get an even worse ROI, and then give up because it's too hard, it's too expensive or it's not profitable or this doesn't work in my industry or whatever excuse you have. Meanwhile, despite what you're doing.

[00:12:11] Brian: Alex Hormozy is in the background scaling a photography studio, a niche photography studio, to 50 million a year because he knows what people like us don't know. So let's talk about what he knows that we don't know, what he's doing that we're not doing, and that is the Hormozy Method. here's how he does it.

[00:12:25] Brian: Test 500 ads to find one to two golden gooses or golden geese,

[00:12:29] Brian: and then scale the one to two golden geese to the moon, essentially. Test 500 ads. He's doing a hundred times more volume than everyone else.

[00:12:36] Brian: how the hell do you do 500 ads? The way he laid it out last week was actually pretty simple. and I want to cover that in this episode. Now, first of all, Alex recommends video based ads and for most freelancers that involves you standing somewhere, talking to the camera, following kind of the things I'm about to share with you.

[00:12:52] Brian: That works better than images. It works better than

[00:12:56] Brian: generic B roll, especially as freelancers. we are the ones, the [00:13:00] person's going to work with, we have to be the one showing up on camera to talk about how we can help them or what we can do for them. So that's the caveat here. And that's what he does at his portfolio companies.

[00:13:08] Brian: And that's what I'm going to recommend you do. So basically three parts of an ad. This is directly from Homozi. There's the hook, there's the meat. And there's the call to action. The hook is basically what gets someone to stop the scroll on meta platforms. It's an interruption based advertising platform.

[00:13:21] Brian: So someone's scrolling through their feed. Something catches the eye, a word or a phrase, orthe first sentence you say or the first line of copy in the post. That is the hook. The meat is basically the most of the ad itself. It's like, what are you going to do for them? I'll talk through again that section a little bit more in a second.

[00:13:36] Brian: And the call to action at the very end of the video, that is essentially what are you going to tell them to do next? Go to your website, sign up for whatever thing it is, right? That's generally the call to action. So how Alex recommends getting 500 ads to test is this come up with 50 hooks, come up with three to five meat sections.

[00:13:51] Brian: That's a weird phrase, meat sections, and then come up with two calls to action. And when you distill it down to that. That comes up with about 500 ads right there. 50 hooks, times 5 [00:14:00] meaty sections, times 2 calls to actions, is 500 permutations of an ad. the reason he recommends this is because the hook is the most important part.

[00:14:07] Brian: If you don't stop the scroll, nothing else matters. So that's why you have 50 of those. You get 50 at bats, 50 chances to stop the scroll. The meat section is important. So once they've gotten past the hook and they're watching core of the ad, that's obviously important. So we need three to five versions of those and then call to actions.

[00:14:21] Brian: They're only going to get there if they've made it through the rest of the ads. That part's a little less important, but he recommends two variations of that. And I'll talk through what those look like. So let's talk about the hooks first. How do you come up with 50 hooks?

[00:14:31] Brian: well, a hook is like this. There's the avatar call out. Like, Who's the ad for? Let's just go to the photography example. You could be a family photographer. You could saynew mothers as the avatar call out somebody who's a new mother.

[00:14:41] Brian: And then along with that, to create more hooks, you can create five problem statements. That's the pain. You're trying to get them away from. Or five goal statements, the pleasure you're trying to get them towards. Now the new mother example, the family photographer example, may not have a lot of problem statements because you're not really solving a pain.

[00:14:55] Brian: But you are working towards a goal, a pleasure statement, or towards a pleasure. So that is like,

[00:14:59] Brian: [00:15:00] new mothers. Are you looking for beautiful newborn photos? Something like that. That's towards pleasure. this is not my niche, so I'm not going to try to come up with five different problem statements or goal statements for this specific avatar, but it could do one for podcast production.

[00:15:12] Brian: Cause that's a background. I know. If you're a podcast production studio,

[00:15:15] Brian: problem statements could be something like, if it's a business owner,

[00:15:17] Brian: are you struggling to get more clients

[00:15:19] Brian: for a thought leader? It could be, are you struggling to sell more books? A goal statement could be, do you want a way to grow your influence as a thought leader? The whole goal here is you know your niche better than I ever will. So once you know five different avatars that you can call out on the ad and you can combine that with five potential problem statements and five potential goal statements, you essentially have 50 hooks right there because what you do is you alternate.

[00:15:39] Brian: You have avatar A with problem statement A. Avatar A with problem statement B, Avatar A with problem statement C, and then you go Avatar with problem statement A. Again, you just are making permutations of this. So five avatar multiplied by five problem statements is 25 variations. Five avatar callouts with five goal statements [00:16:00] is 25 variations.

[00:16:01] Brian: Now you have 50 hooks to test, and I can promise you, 50 hooks to test, one to two of those will everything else significantly. So those are the hooks and that's the big part of this next is the three to five meat sections How do you come up with three to five meat sections because meat sections are kind of a weird term But Alex meathead.

[00:16:18] Brian: He's a big guy if you've seen him So that makes sense for him to call it that For freelancers meat sections are basically this what will you do for them? How will you do it? What's the benefit and this works? Whether it's a direct or an indirect ad a direct ad is where you are directly advertising your services You Indirect ad is where you are advertising a piece of content, or a lead magnet, or some other piece of value that will eventually lead to offering your services.

[00:16:43] Brian: So for a lead magnet, it might be, what would the lead magnet do for them? How would the lead magnet help them? What's the benefit of the lead magnet? Things like that. And you can come up with a couple variations of this, three to five variations.

[00:16:53] Brian: to look at your service as a whole, the value you provide, how you can help, there's several different ways you can kind of position your [00:17:00] service.

[00:17:00] Brian: One variation could be just talking through the process you take your clients through. One variation could be all the deliverables you can help them with. One variation could be focusing on any sort of guarantees you might have around your offer as a freelancer. But that's the meat section, three to five of those.

[00:17:14] Brian: And then the last is. Two call to actions. And these are really easy to do. One is a soft CTA. One is a hard CTA. A soft CTA is like, if that sounds interesting to you, click the button on this video and on that page, you can fill out a short application and see if this is a good fit for you.

[00:17:26] Brian: Something like that. Or on that page, you can book a call and we can have a quick conversation just to see if this is a good fit for you. That's like a soft call to action. A hard call to action is if that sounds like good to you, then I encourage you take this seriously. The longer you wait to launch your podcast or the longer you wait for your newborn to take the photos.

[00:17:41] Brian: It could eventually be too late. there's some sort of consequence. You're really going to harp on the hard call to action where you're going to make sure they understand the consequences of not taking action quickly, and you're going to really like push that hard.

[00:17:51] Brian: the reason that there's a soft versus hard is some people are really bad at hard pitches or hard call to actions at the end of things. So you can really mess that up and just get a bunch of negative comments on your [00:18:00] ads and the soft call to action. It's not as effective long term, but it's a lot easier for most people to do, but it's worth testing both just to see which one works better for you.

[00:18:08] Brian: But when you've created 50 hooks, three to five meat sections and two calls to actions, you have hundreds of ad variations at that point. So from there.

[00:18:15] Brian: You don't have to do anything with all 500 of those yet. You just have them captured, recorded, organized, easily labeled, so that you can every couple of weeks while you're running ads, put a few new variations together. It might be that you test three to five a week or 10 every other week, something like that.

[00:18:31] Brian: But you constantly have new fresh ads to test and their marketing director told me 10 to 40 percent of your ad budget should be on testing new ads. And he said, on lower ad spins, it's closer to that 40 percent on higher ad spins. It's closer to that 10%.

[00:18:44] Brian: For him, a low ad spend is tens of thousands a month. So for most freelancers, you'll likely want to keep 40 to 50 50 percent of your budget on testing constantly and the other 50 percent is on scaling and continuously bringing new leads in for you. the rest of your existence on paid ads is to just beat the [00:19:00] control.

[00:19:00] Brian: Meaning, when you launch those first ads, Whatever the best one is, you'll leave that on, you continuously test and you find a new winner and you put the new winner in there and you will continuously test every week and put the new winner. You're always trying to beat the control, the one that's performing the best of the lowest cost per lead for you.

[00:19:15] Brian: And over time, you'll learn to drive the ad costs down because your messaging is better. You find the winners. You can take the winners and refilm them all in a more coherent way because sometimes when you make these variations. This way, where you're like putting permutations of things together, it may not flow as well as it could if you just shot the whole thing from the beginning.

[00:19:32] Brian: but all these things come together to solve again, that root cause issue that 95 percent of freelancers have, and that's lack of lead generation. and when you figured out how to generate new leads,

[00:19:42] Brian: you've essentially planted seeds in your garden. just like if you are starving today, you're in a famine today, literally, because you don't have any fruits or vegetables to eat.

[00:19:49] Brian: It's because you didn't plant any seeds in your garden two to three months ago. So as freelancers, we need to continuously be planting seeds in our garden so that we can harvest the months down the road. So a lot of times when people are doing paid ads, they don't [00:20:00] realize that. Leads you paid for today may not become clients till two to three months from now.

[00:20:04] Brian: you need to have a really good tracking in place to know where those leads came from, when they signed up on your email list. What? The value of those turned into long term. So this can get technically difficult for some people, but it's worth the effort.

[00:20:15] Brian: Now, if you want some help with this, we are happy to help you out to see if this is a good fit. We actually just rolled out a new guarantee with our coaching program, but we will guarantee a hundred leads for your business in the next 90 days or you pay us nothing.

[00:20:28] Brian: So if lead generation is a priority for you, and this is something you've been struggling with, We can help you with every single element of this from start to finish. So you're not whining around in the dark. It's not as difficult as many people think it is, but it can be useful to have some help.

[00:20:40] Brian: So if you feel like you need some help, you are more than welcome to apply to see this as a good fit for you. Just go to six figure creative. com slash coaching. Once you apply for that, if it's a good fit, we'll have a conversation with you We'll chat about the whole thing, see if still makes sense. We will create an entire client acquisition strategy for you from scratch, a customized one for you specifically. If you don't love it, we part ways no skin off, either of our backs. We just part ways because [00:21:00] if we can't agree on a plan together, then we shouldn't work together.

[00:21:02] Brian: Once you approve that plan, we will work with you over the next 60, 90 days to start generating leads. And again, if you can't generate a hundred leads based on what we work with you on, then we'll refund you. And then we continue to work with you to turn those leads into at least 10, 000 worth of new clients.

[00:21:14] Brian: And if we can't do that, we will keep working with you for free until you do. So if that sounds interesting, just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching to learn more and apply. So that is all I have for you on this episode. Wonderful trip to Vegas. actually be back again in September. For another two days and I'll have more that I learned from that trip as well.

[00:21:31] Brian: So

[00:21:31] Brian: Thanks so much for making it all the way to the end. See you next week on the Six Figure Creative Podcast.