My Favorite 7 Ways To Make Every Client Worth More

335. Increasing client value (AACV)

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Brian: [00:00:00] How much is one client worth to you over the lifetime that you work with that client. Is it low? Is it high? Do you even know, do you even track this stuff? In this episode, I want to break down seven different ways to increase the value of a client to you. ~One of these seven things, one of these seven things, one of these seven things, one of these seven things alone could be enough to increase your, one of these things, one of these things alone could give yourself a 25, 000 or more year per ~one of these seven things alone.

Brian: Could give you a 25, 000 per year raise by itself. ~So imagine if we do all 70 of these, right? So imagine. All seven of these be implemented by your, which was good. ~So imagine actually implementing all seven of these

Brian: when it comes to client value, many freelancers don't even track this. You don't even know what a client's worth to you over a year, over a lifetime, even for a single project, you even track the average project value. And even if you did, a lot of times the numbers are really low. And when those projects are low, ~then clients are simply typically, ~then clients are simply just worth less to you than they could be.

Brian: ~Now, hopefully after the episode I had a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about this, I think it was six metrics. ~Now, hopefully after the episode we had few weeks ago, where I talked about six Uh, you're actually starting to track the metric of client value, which is really important.

Brian: But if you do obvious math, it's plain to see that if you have a lower client value, you were simply earning less than you could compare to someone with a high client value. So let's just do a really quick math comparison, really quick, super simple math. Don't tune out here. If you had 10 clients and they're [00:01:00] worth 5, 000 each, you made 50, 000.

Brian: If you have 10 clients, same 10 clients, and they're worth 10, 000 each, You made 100, 000 same amount of clients, typically same amount of work, double the amount of money ~because double the amount of client, because the diet, because the client value, ~because the variable changed of client value,~ variable changed of ~client value is a huge determining factor of how successful your business is.

Brian: And many, many times you can increase client value by 25%, 50%, 100%, double it. Without even increasing the workload that you have to do on your end. Simply by following one of these seven things, a lot of times we can double or more how much one client is worth to you.

Brian: And when we increase client value, doing any of these seven things that I'm going to talk about in this episode,

Brian: that means that your clients are worth more, which means you make more. You can spend less time on client acquisition because you won't need more clients because those clients are worth more. And you can spend time doing the stuff you actually want to do. Many people listen to the show out of necessity.

Brian: You want more clients. You need more clients. You're trying to grow, right? ~You don't necessarily have to do. And so you spend a lot of time on client acquisition. Let me try that again. ~And so you spend a lot of time on client acquisition activities, lead generation, lead nurture, you're working on sales, all these things that are wonderful things.

Brian: to implement in your business because most freelancers [00:02:00] completely neglect those things. But freelancers also neglect client value and client value is one of the easiest levers to pull or if you just increase that one metric, how much one client is worth to you. If you can just increase that one thing, all other things being equal, your income will start to increase,

Brian: ~which means you're not, ~which means you're actually working the thing you want to do. Many people in our community that I talk to on a daily or weekly basis, if it's up to them, they're just sitting in their cave doing their creative thing. ~They're not. ~They're not marketing, they're not selling, they're just doing the creative thing all day long.

Brian: That's all they want to do. And I resonate with that. You just want to be in creativity mode. And while that's not a hyper realistic way to look at your business, because at the point it becomes a business, there now other operations that have opened up responsibilities that have to get done as a business that you have an obligation to do if you want to keep doing this for a living.

Brian: And I will admit that not everyone is cut out for it. Many people do not have what it takes to run the business side of things and they neglect the business side of things because they just want to be the creative, which is why I have the stupid sign behind me that says it takes more than passion that I've had to hear since, pretty much day one of being in this place.

Brian: ~But this is one of the things, but this episode is going to, ~but this episode talking about client [00:03:00] value, this is one of the easy ways to really increase your income without doing more of that business owner stuff, Some of these things may take a little bit of work, a little bit of effort, a little bit of ingenuity, maybe some bravery, but pretty much all of these can be done by you.

Brian: So if this is your first time ever listening to this podcast, first of all, hello, glad to have you here. ~This podcast is for creative freelancers who offer freelance. This podcast is for creatives. ~This podcast is for freelancers who offer creative services. And Who want to make more money from the services without selling your soul.

Brian: That sounds like you, you're in the right spot.

Brian: Before I get into the seven things here for this episode, I want to talk terms. basic terms that you should know. Client value equals how much is one client worth to you? Is it a hundred dollars? Is it a thousand dollars? Is it dollars? 000, 100, How much does one client worth LTV?

Brian: If you know what that stands for, you're smart. Lifetime value. How much does one client worth to you over their lifetime or your lifetime? Really? Whichever one ends first, if a client stops working with you, the lifetime of that client is over. If you stop working, the lifetime of that client is over either way.

Brian: How much does a client worth? Over the lifetime that's really hard to track because many times know clients like I'm never working with you again A lot of times they just kind of fade away or they stop [00:04:00] needing your service or something shifts they found someone better or someone they resonate with more or whatever And so they kind of fade off into the sunset so you never really know Is their client value done as far as LTV?

Brian: Are they going to keep increasing it? I don't really know how to calculate that. And that's why this third metric is the one I like. It's the one I prefer. It's the one I talk about the most. It's AACV. Average Annual Client Value. It is just simply saying how much is the average client worth to us over a 12 month span.

Brian: And the easiest way to calculate this is just look at your income over the last 12 months and then divide that by the total amount of clients who worked over the last 12 months. Super simple. And so we know one client is worth, on average, if we made 100, 000, and we worked with five clients, we know, on average, our clients are worth 20, 000 each.

Brian: Or if you work with 100 clients, we know our average client's worth 1, 000 each. So those are the three terms. Okay. Thank you. I just going to blanket call it just client value in this episode. I'm not going to get into specific nuance stuff here, but AACV is what I had in mind. Making each client worth more every year is kind of what I had in mind.

Brian: Making your average client value go up. [00:05:00] That's what I look for in a good, healthy business.

Brian: So let's get into this. Number one, the first way to increase your client value is to just get them to buy more of the thing you sold in the first place. I learned this from Alex Ramosi. He says there's three phases that they look at when they're looking at implementing something new or selling products their portfolio companies roll out.

Brian: And that is more, better, new. First sell them more of the thing that you sold them in the first place. Only then do you consider finding something better to sell them or improving on some big concept that you had, Only then do you do the better thing. the last resort, is selling something brand new, a completely different service, a completely different offering, a different package, a different whatever.

Brian: the reasoning for that is, if you sell someone more of what they came to you for the first time, You're guaranteed that they want that thing. They came to it for at one time. There's probably a way to sell some variation of that multiple times to a person.

Brian: And when you look at your income over a year span, Roughly 50 to 70 percent of a good, healthy freelance business, 50 to 70 percent of that income should be coming from past clients, clients that are coming back to you a second or a third or a fifth time, meaning [00:06:00] they're buying more of the same thing that you sold them before.

Brian: It could also be that they're buying other things that you could sell them, which we'll talk about later in this episode, but many times it's selling them the same thing you sold them before.

Brian: ~And this is what, and this was the case in my music production business back in the day. And this was the case in my music production. And this was the case in my music production. ~And this was the case for my recording studio.

Brian: Clients would come to me for music production. I would fulfill on what they paid me to do. Then clients would start promoting their music that we record at the studio. They would release their music, usually an album or an EP of some sort, and then they would start to tour off that music. So the album would come out, label would be releasing it or promoting it.

Brian: They'd be on tour with, as a headliner or a supporting act of some sort. They do. Three or four, maybe five tours in a year span. And then they start working on new music and then they eventually start looking for their next producer, whether it's going to be me again or someone else.

Brian: And the mistake many people make is in that client life cycle that happens, at least in my world, where they're going to come back every year. Three to six to nine to 12 to 18 months, depending on several factors. The mistake people make is ~they're not top of mind when that decision starts to, to start to formulate, ~they're not top of mind when that decision starts to percolate in the client's mind of like, who are we going to go to next time?

Brian: Are we going to go back to Brian?

Brian: ~And so what I did was I, ~and so what I [00:07:00] did is in my CRM, when I finished a project. I would set a date to follow up with that person, about the time that I thought they'd be starting to work on new music. And I've been in a band before, a touring band.

Brian: We were on a label. We toured 300 days a year. So I understood that entire life cycle process because I was the client in that case. So I knew the timeline. If someone came to me to record a single, I knew when I should be reaching out to them, for their next single or their next EP or whatever they're trying to do.

Brian: If someone recorded an ep, which three to five to seven songs, I knew based on how many songs they recorded, how long it will be until ~they ne ~they'll need to come back again if they recorded an album. I generally knew how long it was gonna be before they needed to come back to me again. So I'd always make sure I showed up in their inbox multiple times between now and that,~ that, ~time, and most people.

Brian: Just fail to follow up whatsoever. And I've said this before, I'll go to the grave saying this. If you are not top of mind, when it comes time for the decision to be made by your client, then you will never get the gig. Even if you work with them before, if you're not top of mind, they found someone newer, sexier, better than you, right?

Brian: Someone who's Got all the hype around them, They forgot about little O'Brien, this [00:08:00] studio was cool. He was cool, but like this newer producer, they've got, three more releases out that we really love this year, You may still lose the gig, but I guarantee you, if you're not top of mind, if they're not even thinking about you at that time, you're not going to get the gig.

Brian: So depending on your client life cycle and obviously it has to make sense that they would ever need your service. Again, ~if you're a wedding photographer listening to this podcast, there's probably better photography. There's probably. ~If you're a wedding photographer listening to this podcast, there's probably better podcasts out there for you.

Brian: But in this case, your client's not coming back to you again, right? Unless they divorce. This is going to be a multi year process. There's no way of telling like, this is not the tactic for you. But in many cases, ~is ~you can sell the same service or a variation of the service.

Brian: Again, it doesn't have to be the exact same thing. It can be a variation, a play on it. But understanding the time, the estimated time of when they will start thinking about it, which in my case is when client or when the band started working on new music, writing new songs, I wanted to be part of that discussion. I wanted to be part of like, how's the new songs coming along? Can I hear some of the demos?

Brian: Show them to me. I'll check them out and give you my thoughts. If you want to hear them, that kind of stuff. That got me so many gigs

Brian: And it's such a basic thing to do, but many people don't do the basics. And there's a wonderful ~Amosie ~Alex Amosie quote. He uses [00:09:00] it as a double negative. I understand it's a double negative, but it's catchier when you say it as a double negative, successful people never don't do the basics. the smarter way of saying that is successful.

Brian: People always do the basics and this is one of the basics and people still don't do that for some reason. Are you willing to send one or two or three emails or texts over the next six to 12 months. To a client that you just worked with, that you liked working with, that you would want to work with again in order to get their business again, would you do that?

Brian: Many people say yes, but then they won't do it. And it could be a failure of systems. You don't have a CRM with just basic reminders. You can't say, Hey, Siri, set a reminder in six months to follow up with flannel landing. My favorite band sent him in a minute. my plethora of fake band names. I can come up with

Brian: the Mormon Oreo,

Brian: but you don't have to get crazy fancy with us. It's just a matter of being consistent with it. That's all it takes. And many things in business are just about being consistent. This is one of them. So number one, get them to buy more of the same thing you sold in the first place. When they come back to you again and again, and again, that one client turns from a 2, 000 [00:10:00] project or even a 500 gig into another 5, 000 project.

Brian: And then a 12, 000 project. And now that 500 project or 500 client turned into 15, 000 or more, not to mention over that lifespan of working with that client again and again and again, and the relationship you developed over time, how that obviously that relationship is going to develop and grow through all this, work you're doing together, how many more people are going to refer to you, thus increasing the referral value as well.

Brian: It's wonderful stuff. So that's number one. Number two is build a better package that fully solves a problem. We talk about this on the podcast quite a bit, but it's, worth repeating a lot, ~but there are so many button seat freelancers that listen to this podcast. ~If you are someone who~ who is, ~is, whose service can be found on fiverr.

Brian: com, the exact service you offer ~pack ~pack is the exact same way. You are a button seat freelancer, and that's a dangerous thing to be.

Brian: an easy example that I, like to use is the clients we worked with who were, podcast editors, that's a really good button seat freelance, example where a podcast like this records, we send files, you're a button to seat editing things. that's all you do.

Brian: And [00:11:00] so we've worked with clients who came to us making three, 1500 bucks a month, just doing basic podcast editing. And we gutted their service offering completely revamped it from the ground up to offer a wide variety of services needed to fully solve the problem. And that problem was not, I need an episode edited.

Brian: ~It is someone that. It is. ~The problem is I have no idea what I'm doing with my podcast. I need someone to come in as the expert who can help me with everything from audio setup and audio quality to sonic branding for my show. How do we handle our segments? How long should the episodes be? What is the podcast are going to look like?

Brian: Even launching podcasts from scratch. What about the show notes? What about the actual show notes pages? Where are those hosted? How are those getting done? All these things that come along with actually running a show. There's way more than just editing involved with this ~our pot, ~our clients who took on a bigger responsibility, got a much bigger payout for it because they're not just a button to see.

Brian: They're essentially a trusted partner with the people that they work with.

Brian: And we've got some really cool case studies of podcast editors who've [00:12:00] come to us, revamp their services and doing well over six figures a year now. ~And this was an interesting one. We've, ~and we've had multiple clients also uh, Who have gotten clients in this space worth 18 to 20 or even 30, 000 or more per year.

Brian: So the average annual client value of one new client is ~18 to 15, ~18 to 25 to 30, 000. And so imagine giving yourself an 18, 000 a year raise. Just by getting one additional client because you've revamped your service offering to actually fully solve the problem holistically

Brian: So I've got one example here. I'll just kind of read through this because it's relevant to this conversation But this client he came to us. He was just doing podcast editing He was making somewhere in the range of seven to ten thousand dollars a year I believe have to go look up the exact stats But it's under fifteen thousand dollars a year when he started working with us just doing podcast editing and he says I closed a deal with Business name in Los Angeles.

Brian: I offered to launch their podcast with 10 episodes for 8750. So 8, 750 and that's 5, 000 for the launch plan. So he does a full launch plan with his clients and then 3, 750 for the first 10 episodes. So about 375 per episode. after the [00:13:00] 10 episodes, we'll move to a 1, 500 monthly retainer. 18, 000 a year raise.

Brian: And the 5, 000 deposits already in my checking account. So this is the difference between. A podcast editor, which if we go on Fiverr and look at podcast editors, which I'm not going to do, it can be really, really cheap, 50 bucks an episode, a hundred bucks an episode. He's charging three to four times that amount per episode, plus the roadmap or the launch plan, 5, 000 onboarding fee for that.

Brian: So my question for you is this, is there a way to shift your service to a wider offering, a full service solution? Think about this, what steps happen before they come to you? What steps happen after they come to you? In order to get the thing that they came for and what all can you do

Brian: to help as many areas as you possibly can so in this case there are skills that my clients have already have that they can just utilize already know how to do these things they just aren't offering it right and if you don't offer it you'll never get it And then there's other skills that they don't have, Nick, when he came in, he didn't understand how to create a full podcast launch plan,

Brian: but it's something he learned. He learned from us. He learned from other resources out there in order to create his [00:14:00] own process for what that looks like the value that that provides. But it was a skill set that he could acquire. Over a relatively short amount of time that helped him get an 18,000 a year raise from one client, and he's doing well over six figures a year now.

Brian: So if you don't have the skill set to offer those services, can you learn those services? There's another client that I work with Wilson

Brian: and in order to expand his package, his offering for clients where he was getting before it was like a client for him was worth a thousand or less, like not very much to where now he's closing $15,000 or more packages.~ $15,000~ he's closed 8, and some 15, 000 packages, but he also had to develop, drastically increase his skillset.

Brian: Including new programs that you need to utilize, like software, things like that. I just recorded a case study interview with him. That'll be live soon. That's what i'm talking about where when you were willing to increase the skill set that you possess in order to better help your Clients get what they came to you for you get to reflect that in your income ~like ~So when you look at like how much people invest in a college You spend four years and ~tens of hundreds ~tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars Hoping to get a good job and then you work for years at that job to start getting [00:15:00] raises maybe promotions It's a long and arduous path ~You ~To getting raises, I don't know many people who get a 18, 000 a year raise ~on the regular, ~on a regular basis.

Brian: But think about just from implementing certain skill sets that you lack, seeing that directly affect your income that same year. It's a very powerful thing. This is one of the most attractive things ~to to, ~to me, at least when it comes to entrepreneurship is knowing that the skills and the personal development that I have in my life ~are directly related on direct, ~are directly reflected on my bank account at the end of the year.

Brian: Helps me feel the progress that I make so many people especially in day jobs they do progress they do get better But they're underappreciated by their bosses or by their management or whoever's in charge of their pay their income never goes up This is the beautiful thing about freelancing is when you get better Your income should reflect that and if it doesn't there's something else lingering underneath the surface having to do with yourself That's missing here.

Brian: But that's number two is build a better package that fully solves the problem Instead of just being a butt in the seat number two now we're on to number three and that is find better Clients, so I talk about niching down all the time This is a huge topic on the podcast that I I don't [00:16:00] think I'll ever stop talking about

Brian: if you don't niche down if you don't work with a specific hyper targeted niche client It's going to be very difficult to grow ~and that's either going to, and that's either going to show up in, ~and that's either going to show up, in your delivery, meaning that you are, the genius with a thousand hands, I think is the phrase where you're just like running around with your, like a chicken with your head cut off doing a million different things because every single project to every single client you work with looks completely different.

Brian: There's no uniformity because there's no specificity with the type of client you're working with. ~So I see this, I'm not going to try to give examples here. ~So project a looks like one thing and then project B is completely different. So there's a lot of context switching between projects.

Brian: And so you're always strapped for time because there's so much crap for you to do. That's one reason ~you're a limit. ~You're limited with growth here. ~the other side. Thank you. Is that's assuming you even have projects to do. ~The other side is even getting clients in the first place because every client on earth thinks they're a special snowflake.

Brian: And so when you offer 30 things to 30 different types of people, that throws up red flags, either consciously or subconsciously in people's minds. Easy example is I don't want to go to a pediatrician for heart surgery.

Brian: I don't want to get a colonoscopy from a dentist. ~I don't want~

Brian: ~to get my, I don't want to get, ~I just don't want things that aren't made for me, right? Or don't feel like they're made for me. So when everyone [00:17:00] feels that same way. ~But you're a freelancer, but you're that, ~but you're the freelancer who's, essentially metaphorically running the restaurant ~offering ~that offers, Japanese food, Korean food, Thai food, barbecue,

Brian: Italian,

Brian: Mexican food, So ridiculous that sounds like no one's going to go to that restaurant because there's no specificity in the menu. There's no specialization. I don't even know what kind of restaurant that would be. You don't even see those because those don't exist because they don't work and many freelancers operate their businesses that way.

Brian: So that's the argument for niching down and when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one at all. And so if you try to do what we talked about in the podcast before, where you run ads for your business and you're doing lead generation, even direct offer ads whatever strategy you're trying.

Brian: They won't work. They 100 percent will not work because they're too broad. They're not specific enough that's one part of this conversation, right? We're talking about finding better clients that being said not all niches are created equal

Brian: ~I've seen this in the clients that we've coached. I've seen that with the people that we coach that is like branding design For example, I've seen people that their clients struggle to pay 3, 000 for branding design this basic branding design or even advanced print Let's try it again. I've seen this for clients.~

Brian: ~I've seen this for people that we work, I've seen that with, ~I've seen this with people that we coach, for example, like branding designers, I've seen branding designers who come to us with clients that are struggling to even pay 3, 000 for full branding design, Three grand for that, their clients are unable to pay [00:18:00] three grand.

Brian: And then I've seen people in the exact same field, branding design, who are getting five to 10, 000 for the exact same amount of work. Deliver the exact same way. Some will pay even 20, 000 to 50, 000 or more in some cases, especially in the agency world.

Brian: So when you can take a skill set, a service offering, and offer it to one group of people, and they say 3, 000 is too much. And you take that exact same skill set, and exact same services, and you bring it over to another group of people, and they're like, 10, 000? Done. Where do I sign? Money's in your account.

Brian: Deposit's paid. Which one do you want to work with?

Brian: And what's crazy is freelancers Well, here this episode and they agree with it makes sense. I would need to work with the better people, right? But you refuse to specialize. You refuse to go all in in a niche because you still get those leads that come in. There's like 3, 000 people that barely even pay that.

Brian: Who like, try to beat you down on pricing. I still need those, right? My bill paying work. I don't want to rock the boat, change the messaging on my website. I don't want to do anything different.

Brian: Well, I can definitively say, if you're struggling right now, it's because of what you've been doing. So if you want to be better, if you want to have a better business, it's [00:19:00] time to change. ~And so if ~if you can identify the niche that you should go after, because they have a higher willingness to pay,

Brian: and you, for the most part, love working with those people, or enjoy working with those people enough, even if it's not the perfect client. I know people who are like, I really love this client type, but they're just broke as hell. I don't mind these clients, but they do pay well. ~same ~end of the day.

Brian: This is a business. if you were wanting to have a struggling business, you can work with the broke clients that you love, or you can work with the clients that have money. Even if you don't absolutely love them, as long as you like ~this, ~the work that you're doing and you're proud of the work that you're doing and you enjoy the process that you bring people through, you can find pride in any of that stuff.

Brian: But that is number three is just~ is ~finding better clients. And that involves a whole other conversation about niching down, but taking that same skill set and bring it to the right audience. You can increase your income and your client value that way.

Brian: ~So far we've talked to~ so, so far we've talked about the first three. We've talked about getting people to buy more of the same thing you offer them. We've talked about number two, building a better package that fully solves the problem instead of just being a butt in a seat. number three, taking the skills that you have and just bring it to a better client who has a higher willingness to pay.

Brian: who your services are just more valuable to those people. And then we get to number four, just [00:20:00] find additional services to sell. This is a little different than like the full package thing, because in many cases, the full package thing doesn't work.

Brian: You may have a vast skill set, many different services you can offer, But because of the timing or the way things line up or because of every client being slightly different as far as what they need or what. sort of things you want. You don't want to make a billion different packages to accommodate every little thing.

Brian: Many times you lead with the foot in door service. The thing that every client comes to you for a web, design is a good example of this web design. It's like I need a new website. I'm going to hire a web designer. And so you might charge.

Brian: It's called five grand for website and that's it, They wanted a website. Brian said follow up in 12 months when they need another website. No, not really. They probably not get any other website for a while. Brian says build a package that fully solves the problem. You could probably build a good package around this, even talking about some of the things I'm gonna talk about in this, but like. they want a website done. Build a new website, right? 5 grand. But what other services you offer them? Now that you have the client, you have the conversation. They've paid you before. You like working with them. They like working with you. What else can you sell them? You're going to have all these skill sets.

Brian: Go back to the thing I talked about earlier where the ability to acquire those skill [00:21:00] sets. To see that big of a raise in your income is more than worth it to say, Oh, if I can increase my client value by this much, am I willing to put in that much work? Yeah. I think a lot of people would say yes to that trade off, especially if you end up enjoying these other services.

Brian: But let's just think through this. client comes to me, they want a website, What else do they need? How's their branding? Does their branding suck? Are to make a website with terrible branding? Ooh, that sounds bad. We likely need to go through a full branding workshop and get your branding done and a whole, all the branding guidelines and all that stuff before we work on your website, it's going to be five grand.

Brian: What about the actual development~ development ~web development? Is there any custom development needs to be done? I don't recommend building custom built sites, but many times there's great website builders out there. Many web designers use web flow. There's WordPress. There's a million of them out there at this point, drag and drop for the most part, but there might be some custom development pieces you got to do for whatever reason.

Brian: So maybe there's 2, 000 worth of web development done, this is how a lot of agencies work. Agencies get the foot in the door. ~this, ~They don't have this, all these skillsets. So they just hire freelancers or get teams who specialize in these things and you~ you ~subcontract the work out for a percent percentage of the,~ percent ~total fee.

Brian: So there's also the option instead of acquiring the [00:22:00] skillset yourself, getting people to do it for you. And then just keeping percentage of the cut. next, what about copywriting? Most web designers don't write your websites copy and bad website copy is not going to convert. So if they need a website, let's just say a local business, ~for, ~to have a, online presence in the local area.

Brian: You ~ a like ~a restaurant or a, uh, blue collar kind of plumber or something like that. They want a website that's going to bring in customers or bring in leads or bring in clients or bring in gigs or whatever, right? So we need good copy on the website for that to be done. So that's another two grand.

Brian: ~If they're, if they have a website~

Brian: and we're trying to generate leads for them, is there any lead gen services we can offer them? Maybe we, have the skillset of SEO or we know someone who does, or we can learn it. Maybe we can do paid ads, run paid ads for them, just basic lead generation ads on Meta or PPC ads on Google. We charge a thousand a month for that.

Brian: And as we're generating these leads and getting an email list, maybe we even start offering email marketing services for 500 a month. We're sending a,~ a ~weekly or a monthly newsletter to the list. I got one of the world's worst newsletters from city house here in Nashville. It's a wonderful restaurant.

Brian: Love this restaurant. And it was an [00:23:00] absolute. Dog shit, garbage newsletter, subject line, city house newsletter.

Brian: The one thing in the newsletter I wanted to click on didn't work. Didn't even work when I clicked it. Formatting, horrible design, horrible. They need this service. ~If if you're a, ~if you're a copywriter or an email marketer or even a web designer.

Brian: Who wants to take on this sort of stuff, please reach out to them. They need your help. But even marketing, that's 500 bucks a month, right?

Brian: Now they have a website. They're doing lead generation. Maybe you're running ads now. What about conversion rate optimization, creating split tests, tracking results, making consistent changes to the funnel or the landing page or whatever, in order to increase your conversion rates over time, that's another skillset, another service, 500 a month to do that, to make the ads more effective or help.

Brian: Maybe you just package it in with the lead gen stuff. It's just a nice to have, right? It doesn't take that much work. What about marketing automation as you're generating leads? Do you want to have automated things that happen, like offers that go out at a specific time based on certain things or when they click certain things, a nurture sequence,

Brian: notifications that go out to the account owner, whenever a lead comes in, things like that, or [00:24:00] marketing automation, maybe starts 1500 bucks to set up all of the marketing automation that I need. What about website maintenance? ongoing maintenance for the website being on call for that 150 bucks a month, So from a 5, 000 project to over 15, 000 and over 2, 000 a month, that's what we just added onto this. I would assume that a client's not going to take all of these things, but these are other services that you can start offering your clients in order to increase the value of~ of their~ them to you.

Brian: So even with just an increase of 2, 500 bucks, not a 10, 000 increase, which is what we're doing here, plus 2, 100 a month, not all of that, an average increase from 5, 000 to 7, 500, we just went from a 50, 000 a year business to 75, 000 a year business with 10 clients, nothing else changed other than just doing this one thing, just having additional services to sell them

Brian: now quick note with this, this really only works if you're within a niche, ~Cause go back to my earlier point. ~Imagine you're a web designer and you're working with plumbers, with electricians, with dentists, with SAS companies, business coaches, with other freelancers. And you're trying to design the websites for all of these [00:25:00] different niches.

Brian: Do the branding for all of these different niches, the web development, the copyright and the Legion services, the email marketing services, the conversion rate optimization, the marketing automation, the website maintenance for all these different services. And everyone is different. Everyone's businesses is different.

Brian: Everyone's operates different. Their models are different. What they want is different. The way they act is different. Their budgets are different. That is an absolute nightmare. So if you're going to go this route. We can be broad in our services, but we need to be hyper laser focused, narrow, specific on the type of client that we're working with for this sort of thing.

Brian: So one of our clients who is a web designer, works with accountants. For example, he was an accountant before, so he has that background. He was his client before, right? That's always a great place to go. If you,~ If you can be your, ~if you can work with the old you, so you're selling to yourself, five, 10 years ago, that's a much easier place to operate from as a freelancer.

Brian: I'd say most of my businesses and every successful business that I've had, I. Was the customer for that business before I was the business owner for that business,

Brian: even going back to my studio, my recording studio, I was a band member before I was a music producer, working with band members,

Brian: just like now, where I was a successful [00:26:00] freelancer and business owner before I was ever a coach in the freelancing space. Right? So I understand the challenges. I understand the pain points. I understand what it takes. But when you are a web designer. Working in the counting world, you can understand the nuances of that world.

Brian: What sort of language do they use? What's the business model for that type of thing? What did they value the most? Do they need leads or they need more help on the back end when it comes to operations,

Brian: do they need more help with copywriting or legion? Do they need help with email marketing? Like What services are actually valuable and worth learning and optimizing, but that's number four, finding additional services to sell every additional service that you can sell to your client increases that lifetime value.

Brian: Number five, we're going to move to shift. To recurring services. We have a whole episode on this episode.~ episode. 307 talks about seven pricing strategies. Actually, no, it's not it.~

Brian: 306 offering recurring subscriptions as a freelancer. The Holy grail of freelancing, It really is. If you can offer recurring services, that's the Holy grail of freelancing.

Brian: But there's two kinds of models that I about here. There is my favorite model, which is. Upfront onboarding fee plus monthly retainer and this can be super powerful if you have lot of upfront [00:27:00] work to do for a client meaning like when you get a client up and going there's a lot of things to do but to keep the momentum up long term it's not a ton of work compared to the upfront work that's where an upfront onboarding fee Makes the most sense because there's a lot of front loaded work.

Brian: Also, there could be other things. If you start doing paid ads, there's the ad costs associated with acquiring clients, things like that. An onboarding fee can be super helpful for,

Brian: ~this is the, this is a, ~this is the model that we shifted one of our clients to, I've got the case study that will be out soon for that as well, but he had like 10 clients at the time and we shifted it to an onboarding fee plus recurring monthly retainer.

Brian: And he added 140, 000 a year to his business. So shifted up to, I think it was like 30 clients

Brian: off of like 3 a day of ad spend, fascinating stuff. But that recurring revenue really starts to build up and gives you stability. Freelancing that feast and famine rollercoaster you go through every week, every month, every year, ups and downs, ups and downs, peaks and valleys, recurring revenue, evens that stuff out.

Brian: And then you could be obsessive about how do I get that number up? [00:28:00] How do I increase this monthly recurring revenue thing? Because this is good as a paycheck. It's actually better than a paycheck in many cases, because you have Jay's case, 30 something sources of income instead of just one where a day job is one source of income.

Brian: They could just go away at any point where when you have 30 or more sources of income from different clients paying you every month, now you have a very stable business and all 30 clients are not going to fire you at the same time, That's the first kind of model, very powerful. Again, onboarding fee plus monthly retainer.

Brian: The other model is just a flat monthly retainer with what I call like a bottlenecked broad service offering. One of our coaches actually has this background. So he had, this was his business model. It was doing six figures a year, actually over six figures a year doing this before he started coaching for us.

Brian: he has a vast skillset as a designer, web design, branding, UX, UI.

Brian: The list goes on and on and on. And so when you have a broad service offering, like I talked about before, we're like, Hey, find additional services to sell. You can shift this into a retainer service by offering. popularized by design joy, the unlimited service offering where it's like a flat monthly retainer for [00:29:00] unlimited services, but it's not really unlimited because there's a bottleneck somewhere.

Brian: So in Josh's case, and the same for design joy, they bottleneck it because there's really only one, ongoing project at a time. ~And so ~And so when you pace it that way, you bottleneck it that way. You're able to keep the workload. To a manageable pace where people aren't just like absolutely taking advantage of you sending you 30 things to design at the same time, When you have one design request at a time and you have to like go back and forth and you have a 24 hour turnaround on any communications, there's a whole way to set this up. This is not the discussion for it, but if you set it up correctly. Then you can have the sustainable monthly income of recurring revenue and you have clients that are sending you projects to work on at an even pace that's not overwhelming.

Brian: You have a good, healthy business model at that point. Now this can be hard to balance and there's some drawbacks with this, but it is doable and it's one that I've seen a lot of people do. So that's the other kind of like recurring revenue offering thing here.

Brian: Now again, go to the episode that I just mentioned before, episode

Brian: 306. Where I talk about offering recurring subscriptions as a freelancer, that can get your, [00:30:00] creative juices flowing for how you can maybe shift your business over to that. If you're not currently doing that. Now we're going to move to number six. a little curve ball for you.

Brian: Follow a sales process that actually works.

Brian: Many freelancers don't understand how important sales are to having a high client value. When the client understands the value that you provide, you have a really good sales process for getting those people over the finish line

Brian: ~and the client understands how ~And the client understands why you're worth what you're charging. Then there's less sticker shock and a higher conversion on the back end, right? Higher willingness to pay. Most freelancers just wing this

Brian: and then wing it a lot of times because you just don't know better, right? No one ever taught you this stuff. That can be fine if that's the case, but ~a lot of freelancers have this false, undeserved, ~lot of freelancers have this undeserved confidence with sales. Did I see just because they say they close a high percentage of their leads, Oh, I close like a 90 percent of people that come to me. That's actually a bad sign. We have a whole episode on this

Brian: episode, 224. Why your high sales conversion rate is actually a bad thing.

Brian: I'll give you the quick and dirty version. It's because you don't have leads. You're just getting hottest of the hot leads and you're not actually talking to people who are on the [00:31:00] fence who are like, might be interested, might not those fence leads are where sales actually matter.

Brian: ~There's people, there's like a big chunk of, ~there's a, decent chunk of people who will hire you no matter what. There's a decent chunk of people who will never hire you no matter what you do. And there's that people right in the middle who could go one way or the other. And your sales process will be the difference of whether they say yes or they say no.

Brian: And many people, ~even because never people even had a chance to talk to you ~didn't know your basics for lead generation and lead nurture. you never talk to those people. Then all of a sudden you feel like you're a god at sales and you're not.

Brian: But I'm going to assume for this episode that you are not that person. You're smarter than that. A You're not cocky. Right? You're ignorant. You don't know to do this. To have an actual sales process to follow. A sales process that actually allows you to start talking money on the call.

Brian: A huge, ~what~

Brian: ~scary, ~scary, terrifying thing to bring up for most freelancers, but necessary because when you start talking money, you start getting the real reason that someone doesn't want to hire you. And when you get to the real reason, now you can start to understand what you got to fix in your business to get more clients.

Brian: we've got a whole free sales course for this. You go to sixfigurecreative. com slash sales.

Brian: The link will be on the show notes page for this episode as well, which you can get to by going to sixfigurecreative. com slash three, [00:32:00] three, five. All the links from this episode will be linked there the free course is just a good place to get started. If you don't have any sales process whatsoever, go there as a means to get started, but without a good sales process, ~you're going to, ~you're going to always get beaten down on price.

Brian: ~from your leads,~

Brian: which is going to hurt your confidence. You're not going to want to raise your rates,

Brian: which leads me to number seven. And you know, I couldn't do this episode without talking about number seven. ~just raise your damn rates. ~And that is just raise your damn rates. I've had this rant so many times of this podcast,

Brian: but there's so many people listening to this podcast right now or watching this clip on whatever it's going to be clipped.

Brian: That if you just raise your rates just a little bit, 10, 20, 30, even 50%, double them, right? Double your rates, even get brave and yeah, you'd lose some clients, but the net positive of what that's going to do to your income, more than worth that to many people. It's just scary. People are too scared to do this and it's almost always a lead generation issue.

Brian: Similar with sales, you're scared to raise your rates and you talk about money on the call because you don't want to scare them off because you got two leads this month and you got to close both of them or else you can't pay your bills, right? It all comes down to low leads. This continues to be the number one issue that freelancers [00:33:00] face.

Brian: And it's driving your pricing down. It's keeping you from confidently raising your rates. ~It's keeping, it's making you, ~it's forcing you to negotiate with clients who are like Well, could you do 2, 000? I can't do 3, 000.~ 000. Yeah, I can do 3, 000. I can do 2, ~Yeah, I can do 2, 000.

Brian: You just lost 1, 000 out of your pocket because you said, Ah, I can come down on price. In most cases, if you just said, No, that's the price, They'll still say yes, ~many cases, more than one third of the cases, I'm saying ~more than two thirds of the cases where they say yes to that. ~So if you just said yes, more times.~

Brian: So if you just said no more times to the price going down, when they try to negotiate against you. You make more money, but it's hard to do when you have to close the deal, there's so few leads, this is the only opportunities I have. ~It's the guy who's smothering his girlfriend or his prospects for girlfriends because I get out of this fucking delete that.~

Brian: It's the classic smothering the leads in love because that's the only ones you got.

Brian: So if you're not confident in raising your rates. And you're not confident talking money on sales calls. It's likely because you just don't have enough at bats. It's so much easier ~stick to your pricing, ~ stick to your guns on the pricing, so much easier to say no to negotiations when you have 10 more leads you know are going to come in this week or this month.

Brian: ~I had, ~and just to talk numbers really quick, I had over 500 [00:34:00] people apply for our coaching program last month in October, over 500 people applied for our coaching program.

Brian: Do you think I negotiated the price down with any person? No. With 500 people

Brian: and the limited slots that we had. No, I did not.

Brian: But if you just commit to yourself, I'm going to raise my rates for the next 10 products that I do. I'm going to stick to my guns. And just like Brian said, I'm going to raise my rates by. 20%. 20 percent ~ of your increase, ~If you're at 50, extra 10 grand.

Brian: That's almost 1, 000 extra per month. If you're at 100, 000 a year, that's 20 grand extra in a year.

Brian: That's 1, 600 a month extra.

Brian: You can go buy an island for that much. Let's go buy islands. That sounds fun. Not quite that much money, but it's measurable amount. It's something that's meaningful to you. You can do a lot with that, ~but those are the six, ~but those are the seven things. I'm going to go through this one more time.

Brian: There's get your people to buy more of the same service they already bought. Just follow up with them when the time comes. Number two is build a better package that fully ~serves the ~solves the problems instead of just relinquishing yourself to being a butt in a seat. Don't be another ~five or ~freelancer.

Brian: We don't need any more of those. We need people who are solving full problems and not just being [00:35:00] butts in seats. It can be scary to be a real business, but it is worth it. Number three, find better clients. Your skillset can just be change the direction five degrees to the right and you get paid twice as much for the same skillset.

Brian: The same level of attention to detail that you have the same amount of work that you're doing. Just five degrees to the right. Find better clients. Number four, find additional services to sell. So when you get the foot in the door of the client, what other things can you help them with? This is again, going back to fully solving the problem or finding other problems to solve when you get there.

Brian: Number five, shift to recurring revenue. The holy grail of freelancing. If you can have a recurring subscription or a retainer where every single month the client is paying you for something ~set the business up in a way that the client is Amount of hours per month that you work for that client and you ~and you set the business up in a way so that~ so ~the amount of money they're paying you every month is More than worth the amount of hours you're putting towards that client every month good way of increasing value of your clients number six Following a sales process that actually works so that you can get your clients to say yes to the higher prices more and then number Seven is just raise your damn rates just Add a zero, look at your rates [00:36:00] and multiplied times 1.

Brian: 2. And then that's what I'm going to charge for the next six months. We can experiment it. Just see what happens, right? You will make more money if you're listening this episode, by the way, on Spotify, or you just love me one of the two, this is what I'm gonna ask you at the end of this episode, open our podcast page, you're listening to podcast right now on the podcast app, just open the podcast page, you might have to scroll to the very top, if you're like on the episodes list, it might be defaulted to the bottom, I don't know, but to scroll to the very top of our podcast page where you can actually see the show art and all that stuff at the top in the description, Bye.

Brian: Bye. Click the three dots near the top and rate the show. And here's why we're at 163 ratings right now. This podcast is growing on Spotify as a platform. ~We it's ~for the longest time, Spotify was such an insignificant part of our streamership, was always Apple, which still remains our number one.

Brian: But if we can get to 200 ratings on there, that would help the show. Spotify is one of the few places that actually shares episodes and the algorithm based on what people need, And so I would love for the show to grow. So if you can leave a little rating in there, get us to 200 ratings, that would be wonderful.

Brian: That's all I'm gonna ask for you [00:37:00] this episode. Pretty easy. Just call it the gentlemen's or the gentle woman's agreement that if you've got value from this episode or this podcast at all, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, however long it takes to scroll up that long ass list to get at the top, hit the three dots and just rate the show.

Brian: I mean, you don't have to do the review thing. the review thing is~ And the whole, ~too much work. Just rate the show. That's all I have for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to the six figure creative podcast. I'll see you next week as always.