My top 4 lessons from 2024

Episode art
“Growth at all costs” can be dangerous. It's a CRAZY thing to try to grow only to sacrifice everything else in your life.
 
Here's my 2024 in bullet points:
→ 2X’d the business (third year in a row)
→ Took my mom to Europe for a month (her first trip abroad)
→ Shut down operations for 2 weeks straight (paid the team to do nothing)
→ Zero 9pm work marathons (I never work past 5pm and never work weekends)
→ My wife still loves (and likes) me (because I prioritize her over the business)
 
But let’s be clear—I didn’t just coast. This isn’t some “sit on a beach and brag about my life” kind of business.
I worked hard when I worked. And I actually enjoyed my life when I didn’t.
 
This week I’m sharing the four biggest lessons that made this possible—so you can grow your business without working yourself into the ground.

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348. My top 4 lessons from 2024

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Brian: [00:00:00] So last year, 2024, this business more than doubled in size. After actually more than doubling in size. in 2023. just to share some numbers. We're currently on a multi seven figure run rate right now.

Brian: And I was able to do this last year without overworking or underworking. I continue to work my normal nine to five Monday through Friday. I get up, go to the gym, do my normal routine, start work around nine o'clock and I'm done before five o'clock usually. So I am, am working. I'm not underworking.

Brian: This is not some lifestyle business. But I'm also not working myself to the bone. I got to take my mom, out for the summer. We went to Europe because she retired in June. So July we spent the entire month in Europe. That was something that like, it's a once in a lifetime thing, right? I wanted to treat her to a trip.

Brian: She'd never been out of the country before. If you've been listening to the show, you heard me talk about that. And then we also shut the entire company down for the last two full weeks of this year to give the team some time off.

Brian: I was also able to do this in 2024 without ruining the relationship with my wife. Like a lot of business owners have done. The divorce rate for entrepreneurs my guess. I haven't looked at the status is probably much higher. Then of nine to fivers entrepreneurs [00:01:00] are notorious for prioritizing their businesses over the relationships So in my opinion right now my wife and I are closer than we've ever been you have to ask her opinion on this As well, but think she'd say close to the same thing and I love being with her so that hasn't been sacrificed To grow the business.

Brian: And I also didn't sell my soul. If you've heard me talk about this on the podcast before I've said this podcast is for creatives who want to make more money without selling their souls. There's some variation of that. I've said over the years, I love what I do here. I get to feel the impact that we have on our clients.

Brian: I get to feel the impact I have on my team as we grow the team and I get to help develop the team and get them to where they want to go as people working for me. And ultimately I was able to do this in 2024 and I'm going to share the four lessons here that I've, learned throughout this last year, but I was able to do this because this is the healthiest.

Brian: Most fundamentally sound business I've ever had. I was in a band when I first started. That was technically a six figure business from 2004 to 2008. Independent band. We eventually got signed and toured and did that, thing as well. Then I started my studio that I did that for a decade.

Brian: Grew that to multiple six figures grossing over seven figures throughout my freelancing career there. Two software companies, both of those over six figures. I've also done real estate, Airbnb, all of those [00:02:00] things are great. None of them were bad businesses, but this one is the most fundamentally sound.

Brian: And I probably should just do an episode breaking down all of the factors of why this is the most fundamentally sound episode. If you want that, just reach out to me, I'll, put an outline together and do it maybe next week. that's ultimately why I'm able to do this. But I want to talk about the four big lessons I learned last year along the way That's helped me not just double business last year, but I will again, double the business again this year. We're on track to do that. That's the goal.

Brian: And I think these four lessons will be helpful for most, if not all of our listeners. So if this is the first time I've listened to the show, first of all, hello, I'm Brian hood. I kind of talked about my history a little bit just there. So I'll skip all that,

Brian: but this podcast in a nutshell is a way for me to take, all I've learned from my experiences and my backgrounds and all the industries that I've been involved in and learn from all of the clients that we're working with now and all the different freelance industries and all the other of information I learned from other influencers and other educators on how to run a good, fundamentally sound business.

Brian: and bring that back to freelancers. If you feel like you're stagnated or you feel like your influences in your space don't really know how to run a business, this might be a good podcast for [00:03:00] you. If you like just looking to your peers to the left and the right on how to run a good business, maybe this podcast isn't for you, but this is how we take diverse sources, diverse, new information to be better creatives.

Brian: Because just like if you're trying to design something or you're trying to produce music, my background is music production. If you just listen to the same thing all the time or just look at the same looking websites all the time as a web designer or just look at the same brands all the time, you're not going to innovate just like in your business.

Brian: You're not going to innovate if you just look to other business owners, just like you. So this podcast is my way of bringing a lot of different insights from a lot of different industries into this world,

Brian: because I don't know many people that talk about other industries and how they apply it to freelancers. So let's talk about the four lessons here. So the first thing I'll talk about is in my specific case, as we grow every year, I have to detach my time from what I make.

Brian: And I think that's why a lot of freelancers are doing what they're doing is they, maybe worked a day job or they worked an hourly job. And they wanted to get away from trading dollars for hours or hours for dollars. However, you look at that, Many freelancers now are still trading hours for dollars where you're just charging hourly or just charging daily. And maybe you want to get away from that. the only [00:04:00] way to double your business, if you're directly tied to dollars for hours is to double the amount of time you work.

Brian: And at a certain point, that just utterly breaks down. Every freelancer who has been successful at what they do has likely hit that upper limit at least one month in their life where you couldn't possibly take on more work. And so you know what that upper cap is. So the only way to get away from that.

Brian: Is to completely detach your time from what you make in the lesson I've learned again and again. And last year I learned again because I still hit this limit all the time is that I am still doing things that I shouldn't be doing.

Brian: So last year I had to learn the lesson many, many times. I've talked about in the podcast before, but that's ruthlessly implementing the easy eights. We've talked about it on the show before the easy eights are eliminate, automate, delegate, and mitigate. And I'll kind of walk through those and how I've done things in this business over the last year.

Brian: We've had multiple episodes on this before

Brian: to go way back to episode 216. How to spend less time doing the stuff you hate and it's called the Easy Eights Framework. But this is the gist of it here all the things in my business that were not moving the needle that I was currently working on or that honestly anyone was working on the business.

Brian: If there was resources devoted to it, [00:05:00] someone else's time. Add dollars, especially my time, ruthlessly eliminating that from the business. Just kill it. If it's not effective, or it's not bringing in the same level that something else might be bringing in, or not the same level of success as something else, just ruthlessly eliminating it, getting it out of there.

Brian: Because there's no point in automating something that shouldn't be done. There's no point in delegating, handing off a task to another teammate, if it's something that shouldn't be done in the first place. So, just looking at the business and finding all the areas that no one should be doing at all and just eliminating those things.

Brian: Next was just automating the things that were tedious that I was doing that could just have easily been done by some other system that can do automation, whether it's Zapier or marketing automation systems or project management systems. There's a lot of ways to automate different things.

Brian: And one example was just as we started to grow and bring on more and more clients, in our biggest month, we brought on like 27 new clients, the process of onboarding all those clients can be very manual, very tedious. At that level, if you're just bringing on a few a month, it's really easy to make that a very manual process.

Brian: Here's the form you need. When that's sent back, here's the client agreement. Here's the [00:06:00] calendar to book this thing. But as we grew, building out a very good, well thought out, well automated onboarding system that move people through a visual pipeline. where we can see every single person is in the onboarding phase and have followups for anyone who's taking their sweet time to make sure they're not missing something or make sure they're not needing something from us or whatever.

Brian: That was one of the big things that we fully automated last year.

Brian: So it takes less brainpower and time for me to manage and my team as well.

Brian: The third part of easy gates and the thing that was the biggest move for me last year. And 2023 was delegating. So there are things that I should not be doing because there are people who are better at it than me, if you are an entrepreneur and you're like me, where you're okay at everything.

Brian: It's not hard to admit to yourself, right? There's a few things that I'm really good at that are hard to hand off, but I understand that most things I am not good at, right?

Brian: we brought on four new full time people last year

Brian: and everybody that I brought on is better at the thing that they do than I am.

Brian: And so this is a really tough thing for a lot of people to do because they look at it as money out the door. There's kind of two factors to look at. One is how much are you paying out? And then the other one is how much you're getting back. [00:07:00] this is just basic investment, right?

Brian: I'm investing X amount per month into a new employee. I'm getting multiples of that back from that employee in two different forms. One is, maybe revenue that that specific person is generating or in forms of time that I'm getting back on my calendar or my schedule that I can put into other things that do generate revenue for the business.

Brian: this is actually something that I, have to relearn all the damn time. But the very first time I ever did this was 2014, maybe 2015 and this was as a freelancer, when I took all of the tedious setup work for my projects and handed it off to someone else, I paid them something like 30 bucks an hour to do the setup, which is a tough pill to swallow for anybody.

Brian: When you're paying someone else 30 bucks an hour, I probably couldn't have gotten a lot cheaper, but it's just somebody that I trusted. I knew them. They'd worked for me before in the studio as an assistant, but they did all my prep work. For my mixing projects, and then it saved me 80 percent of the the session, and I'm able to just open it up, do the big picture, strategic creative stuff, and then I'm done with it.

Brian: So instead of 10 hours, I spend 2 hours on it. So he didn't directly give me money, but he took down 80 percent of the [00:08:00] work. and I'm trying to remember the exact math. I have a YouTube video on this, but the math was something like, I might get paid $600 to mix a song.

Brian: I pay him out 240 of those dollars.

Brian: I have $360 remaining and I spend two hours, and that's 180 bucks an hour. It was actually probably a little more favorable than that. But, at the end of the day, my time went from earning 60 bucks an hour to 120 dollars an hour. Something like that. I think it was closer to 300 an hour in the video that I did, but that's just one example of someone saving you time that turns into more money because I could take on more projects.

Brian: This is really the most relevant when you've hit that ceiling of how much time you can spend on something. This is not for somebody who's barely scraping by right now. Delegation is for when you're time poor, not money poor. Automation is for anyone. Time, poor money, poor. You can automate a lot of things very efficiently, very cheaply without investing much money in it.

Brian: And this is where we get to the fourth thing in the easy eights, and that is mitigate. There are things that I have to do. I have to do this podcast. I can't, right now hire someone else to do this.

Brian: We'll see how that goes in the future. I have thoughts. But there are things that I have to do. Like this podcast.

Brian: I don't have a teammate doing this. I don't have somebody I've [00:09:00] hired on to do this. and I can't automate it. I can't just eliminate it because it's very effective for our business. It's a big part of this business.

Brian: But I can mitigate it. Meaning, I can make this suck less for myself. I can remove all amounts of friction.

Brian: And so I've done crazy things like I have the Amazon device, which I'm not going to say the name of right now because it might Turn on right now and start listening to me, but I have a thing where I might say

Brian: Hey girl Turn on my studio lights. It turns all the lights on in the room I have all my microphone settings on a preset. I have my camera. I can just turn it on in one press. Oh, and I also have something called Alfred set up to with one command opens up all the windows I need for the podcast.

Brian: So really in about 30 seconds to a minute, I have everything open and ready to go, including all programs, all tabs, everything ready to go to do the show to counter that before I would have to make sure the lighting is good. I didn't have professional lights. I have to make sure the window was open a certain way.

Brian: And if the lighting was bad, I have to adjust the camera aperture or brightness settings, and then. I'd have to make sure the mic sounds good. Make sure I look good on camera. I have to make sure that I pull all the programs up and all the tabs that I need, et cetera, et cetera. I also have a checklist I go through for the podcast.

Brian: I don't have [00:10:00] to use my brain power before doing the show. That's an example of mitigating using systems, processes, kind of sort of automations. Actually, if you think about it to make this thing suck less so that I'm able to do it consistently every week without giving up. And there are dozens of little things like this in my business and in my life that I've had to do this on because I can't eliminate, I can't automate, I can't delegate it.

Brian: The only way to do is to mitigate the amount of suckiness involved with doing something. And don't get me wrong, I love doing this show, but setup sucks. I don't want to have to do this crazy manual setup process every time.

Brian: So that was the first big lesson. The first big thing that allowed us to double last year and again, double this year is ruthlessly doing this all the time. There will be more things that I have to take myself out of, or we have to automate to a better degree. We have to eliminate all together. Or have to bring more team members on to do.

Brian: For example, right now, I do all of our marketing. I am the head of marketing for this company. I am the head of sales for this company. I am the head coach for this company. I am the head of operations for this company. I do all the things for this company. And as we grow, I cannot, it's too much.

Brian: and we get in the point now where, we can start to have people who are in charge of every single [00:11:00] department of this company. that's the kind of business this is starting to be. Next big lesson from 2024 for me was recurring revenue makes all the difference.

Brian: we had a podcast on here. Actually a couple of podcasts on this episode, 306 offering recurring subscriptions as a freelancer, the holy grail of freelancing. And then the next episode after that three Oh seven was, seven pricing strategies for recurring subscription, freelance clients. any client we can get to do this, we do it.

Brian: And then for our own business, this has been fundamental for us being able to grow for a couple reasons. One is if you offer recurring subscription for anything, you are forced to make it good unless you lock people in the longterm contracts. Even then, if you have somebody who doesn't want to pay you, they're not going to pay you.

Brian: Even with a contract, unless you're going to go sue that person. we don't do contracts forcing our clients to be with us long term. All of our clients, with exception of a couple, 'cause we did test this for a while. All of our clients are a month to month payments with us. They can cancel it anytime. And because of that, you have something called churn and that is what percentage of your clients cancel each month? Last year our churn was 3.67%. Per month, each month, 3. 67 percent of our clients left us. If you know [00:12:00] anything about, subscription metrics, that's insanely good, especially for coaching business like this,

Brian: and that didn't happen overnight. It's taken a lot of time to get to the point where we deliver a good enough service where people want to stick with us long term. In order to stay with us as long as people do, they have to get good results. They have to like working with us. They have to like community involved with us.

Brian: So we do a lot within that keep people happy. but if you can pull it off, it makes growth much easier because I don't have to find new clients every month. We could get zero new clients in 2025. And we would make about the same as last year

Brian: with zero new clients.

Brian: We could bring on the exact same number of new clients last year. And we will likely close to double if not go over double the business. So I'm not stuck in this constant cycle of finding new clients every single month even though it still happens. I still get new clients every single month. Last year I looked at the numbers.

Brian: our lowest month of new clients was seven clients. Our biggest was 27 something like that. We averaged 12 new clients a month.

Brian: All the bills can be paid. My entire team can be paid. I can still get paid what I need to get paid without bringing on any new clients because our recurring revenue [00:13:00] pays for everything.

Brian: And then it also, and this is a big one is just keeps things steady. Any of our clients who have recurring subscriptions or recurring revenue don't have these big feast or famine months. We don't have these big feast or famine months.

Brian: Things are rock solid steady. And seeing that play out through last year as we brought a more team members, which is kind of terrifying or can feel terrifying, especially full time people that you're paying salaries to with benefits. They have families, that stuff is intimidating for myself.

Brian: It's something I avoided for years and honestly held me back because of that fear, but having the recurring subscription, the recurring revenue instead of one source of revenue, we have very diversified revenue because every single person is an independent source of revenue for the company.

Brian: Thus I'm secure. This company is secure. My team is secure and that's why when we work with clients, we don't want to have minnows or whales. We don't want to have clients that are worth too little.

Brian: We don't have clients that are worth too much. If they're too little, then you spend a lot of time fulfilling on the small minnow clients, without a good return. On that time or with well clients, if you lose one whale client, someone who's paying a lot per month, that can be devastating.

Brian: Like the example I had with [00:14:00] somebody that I talked to, they didn't end up joining our program, but they had 22, 000, something like that, something thousand dollars a month, they were getting paid from Dropbox as a contractor. I had a whole episode on this and why that's not a good thing.

Brian: Boils down to recurring revenue. Great. One source of recurring revenue, not great. It's actually worse than a day job. A day job is one source of recurring revenue. However, you have a little more safety there. There's the expectation of a long term engagement. If you perform on your job, most likely they're not going to fire you.

Brian: You can be let go. They can downsize. There's still risks involved there, but with a contractor, they can just let you go at any time because they don't need the position anymore. We're good. There's no real legal protections you have as a contractor.

Brian: So that's just a extreme example of a whale client. So if you can keep your recurring revenue to where no client's worth more than 10 percent and no client's worth less than about 2 percent or up to 5%, it depends on what your annual revenue is. Really. individual client's worth less than 1 percent of our, revenue.

Brian: However, we're at a higher scale than most individual freelancers. So that's the second lesson. The first is just the easy eights constantly. Ruthlessly [00:15:00] getting rid of things that I shouldn't be doing, automating things that are tedious or taking up too much time or mental bandwidth. Mental bandwidth is a huge thing for last year.

Brian: Delegate things that should be off my plate because there's other people who are better at it than I am. And there's more things this year that will come that will be off my plate because I'm not good at certain things. And then mitigating things, things that I have to do. You know, make that easy for myself.

Brian: And then the second one is recurring revenue, making the difference in the business, keeping it steady, forcing us to innovate, have a really good client experience. So people want to stick around. And the third thing, a lesson from last year is how much the numbers matter.

Brian: Numbers matter a lot. I had a whole on this, on the seven metrics you should be tracking as a freelancer,

Brian: episode three 32. The exact title of the episode is actually seven Must Track Metrics That Will Make You More Money in 2025. it sounds pretty extreme when you put it that way. you know, podcast titles click Beatty, right? Sometimes, but it's dead serious. I would not have made it as much in 2024 if I didn't track my metrics.

Brian: starting in April, I religiously started tracking things daily because what I found was. Things would crop up, and then by the time I [00:16:00] was made aware of it, it was a bigger problem than it should have been. And when I started tracking something like, it was 30 different metrics I track every day, I think I only have to write down Maybe 10 or 15 of them, but then the rest are just auto calculated in the spreadsheet.

Brian: Cause I have formulas built out. I built this whole crazy custom spreadsheet for this business, but that's where I nerd out, which by the way, chat GBT is wonderful at helping you build out formulas and things when you're trying to get stuff done. I'm not a formula expert, but I do have to use chat GPT and I built really good spreadsheet for us,

Brian: but I track it daily because we're at a much size when I was just a solo freelancer. I wish I would attract this weekly,

Brian: but daily at our size, I'm able to spot these issues before they become big issues.

Brian: So as I'm writing the number down every day, I can spot these red flags when they come up and I can start investigating them further. And what I find is there's certain things that are wrong or something's off somewhere, especially because we're spending so much on paid ads right now.

Brian: And so it's like ripping out a tumor before it grows. I'm able to spot it before it becomes too big of a problem that can take the business down or hurt the business in a big way.

Brian: Not only that, it's just having the right tools. The sense of peace in my business that every day takes about [00:17:00] five minutes. First thing I do in the day,

Brian: I write down all the metrics. I look to see how that compares to, you know, what are the trends for the month? How does that compare to our overall averages over the last year? And are things getting better or worse? And if things are getting worse, I have time to address them before they get horrible. And this again, becomes more and more important as this company grows, because I have team members to pay.

Brian: And it's not just my income that's affected,

Brian: but also I have a bookkeeper now as well. This is another point of being able to be responsible for my numbers. I have a bookkeeper. I meet with her every month. We talk over all the business's numbers, our entire P and L, every single line item of things that we spent. And and that allows me to then spot things we should be paying for, like software subscriptions, or things that are paying too much, like something went up in price, just basic things that I ignore because it's not top of mind for me, because I'm not going through my books that crazy because I don't have time to do that when I was doing it myself.

Brian: And so she does all that for me. She flags things that she thinks are important. I should be made aware of, and then we look ahead to the next month, next two months, we project ahead. What is revenue going to look like in this? And I'm really good at projecting what the revenue will be over the next month, [00:18:00] sometimes two months ahead, because I know my numbers so well, I can accurately predict how many new leads, how much we're going to spend on ads, how many book calls, how many new clients.

Brian: And because we have, you know, the last two years of all my financial data as a company, we're able to accurately predict how much we're going to spend on each line item for the next month or two. So I have really good financial projections moving ahead. And I can plan for things like hiring. I can plan for things like paying Alex Hamozy a bunch of money to help me with my business, last year.

Brian: And it just gives a sense of peace because it is so hard at this level to stay on top of everything. And just, focusing on the things that really matter like the daily metrics and the monthly meeting with my bookkeeper to make sure everything is all good. Nothing is too crazy off the projections that we set ourselves, you know, a month or two ago.

Brian: Nothing's popped up. That's crazy. Nothing is looking insidious. Profit margins are healthy. Everything is good. The team members can relax because they know this business is going to shut down anytime soon. So they're taken care of.

Brian: And that's why 2024 was a big year of learning how important the numbers were for me. I got that bookkeeper near the beginning of last year. she [00:19:00] went through and did all my numbers for 2023 as well. that was the first year I ever had a bookkeeper first year ever started tracking daily metrics and it was a big improvement on overall clarity, peace of mind and fixing these problems before they came.

Brian: Huge problems.

Brian: And my fourth and last lesson that I'll talk about as far as my big lessons from 2024 was how important implementation was more than learning new things. I used to read every single morning, like 2023. And before that it was just like my morning was my reading time. I went on, God, four or five podcast walks every day and 2024 I barely read.

Brian: I barely listen to new podcasts. I currently only subscribe to three different podcasts and even that I'm not listening to all the podcast episodes of those. So last year, the only books I read were, I reread Jim Long's Secrets by Alex Ramosi. It's his best book in my opinion, as far as a holistic business model look at how to build a good business that's fundamentally sound, recurring revenue, front end, back end revenue, all that stuff.

Brian: and then I read a couple skills related books that were things that I was lacking in skills that I could directly implement into my business. At the time that I was reading it. three books last year for [00:20:00] business, by the way, I still read and listen to audio books for just pleasure.

Brian: So just fantasy books, cause I'm a nerd, but strictly business, only those three podcasts, only those three books. that's because, a lot of the information I was taking in was still Kind of like infotainment, especially for podcasts, but I was getting better in 2024 at the end of 2023 on reading just in time information versus just in case information.

Brian: This was the year about just implementing the things I already knew versus taking in a bunch of new information. I heard Alex Shimozy talk about this. think it was in one of the live events that I was at that he was speaking at. think somebody asked him, where does he go to learn right now?

Brian: And he just said, this is not a season of me going to learn new things. I know what I need to do to implement it. It's just a matter of putting my head down and implementing it. And so that was the lesson I took home. I, Realized there are a lot of things that I know my business I need to do. They take time.

Brian: They take effort. They take energy and they take focus. And so for every new book I read or every new podcast, listen to, or some other outside source of things that I was bringing into my brain, which is again, good when you feel lost. Good when you feel hopeless, it's good when you feel like you're stagnant, you don't know what to do.

Brian: But once you have a [00:21:00] good plan and you know what to do, it's just a matter of executing it.

Brian: so one of the things I struggle with is ADHD and shiny object syndrome, right? A lot of people feel the same way. I would hear these new things or find these new things and I want to go try them just instantly go execute, right? Because entrepreneurs are doers, right?

Brian: But the problem was, it would take me away from the sound strategy I knew I should be doing, the things I know I should be working on, that I know is going to push the needle forward, and brings me into the world of like, this is fun. This is novel. This is going to make me, feel better, right?

Brian: Versus the things I know I should do that I may not want to do, but I know will make my business better.

Brian: so I had to deal with a shiny object syndrome, and there's still also conflicting advice. You're going to find lots of conflicting advice, how to do things. So what I decided to do, and I actually started this in 2023 is find the people that I really deeply resonate with, and then just go all in with them.

Brian: So 2023, I hired a coach to help me, on the strategy side for our business, and then also bringing on new team members. Cause the new area had never gone into in 2023 was hiring full time team members. to support this business. I was definitely allergic to it.

Brian: So I got close to him, hired him, and then doubled the business in 2023 as a [00:22:00] result of that direct result of that. Then I hired Alex Ramosi and his team in 2024 to help me again, double last year, 2024, because I aligned with Alex Ramosi's methodologies, the way he teaches, the way he thinks they believe in the law of constraints, which is something that I work with all my clients on is something that I fundamentally believe in.

Brian: And that is your business will only grow to the level of its biggest constraint. And for freelancers, the biggest constraint in almost all freelance businesses, if it's not pricing business model itself, it's almost always lead generation. That's the area that if that just came into existence, if you just started generating more leads, you would make more money as a freelancer.

Brian: From there, there's always going to be some other bottleneck in your business, whether it's you don't know how to sell those people, you're bad at sales because you've only ever sold to people who are the warmest, the best. Easiest to close leads, which is a lot of freelancers.

Brian: It could be fulfillment. You're bad at fulfillment. You're slow. You don't automate anything, et cetera, et cetera. But that's what Alex Moseley believes. That's what his team teaches on. They call it the value acceleration method. it's their special sauce, what they call the law of constraints or the theory of constraints.

Brian: But I paid him and his team 75, 000 last year to work closely with [00:23:00] him. And that got me, two days. At the headquarters with a bunch of other people learning kind of the fundamentals of, how they teach, how they believe what they do, how to implement that in my business, spend a full day with Alex Simozy around August, go back for two days with their leadership team and work directly with them on what I implemented from Alex Simozy.

Brian: And then I'll be back again in. March but that amount of money was more than ever paid for anything in my entire life, except for this house. But even with this house, the down payment wasn't 75, 000. So it was the single most amount of money I've ever paid for anything at one time. And then even in 2023, I paid 50, 000 for that coach. So as I've grown, and as I've invested in myself again and again, I've proven to myself that I can make these bigger bets on myself because I will use information.

Brian: I will execute, I will get a return on my investment. But I didn't start at that level.

Brian: And then obviously the opportunity of double my business every year, that becomes a larger and larger return on my investment. So I'm willing to invest more.

Brian: So just take a zero off it for you. Whatever that number sounds scary, maybe send 500 is a more appropriate amount for you to invest in your business to hire somebody to [00:24:00] help,

Brian: but there's an added benefit for me in this unique position because this core business for six figure creative specifically is You call it business coaching, but really it's more of consulting there's a big difference between coaching consulting and we call ourselves like coaches. We call it a coaching program, but really it's consultancy because we have frameworks and things that we help implement and things that we teach from a specific methodology versus just like.

Brian: A therapist where you show up and just talk, right? That's what I think a lot of people think of when it comes to coaching. Yes, they have frameworks. They walk people through. We are truly more of a consultancy than a coaching company, but because of that, I have the added benefit of learning from these other amazing business owners and entrepreneurs.

Brian: So when I spend 75, 000 on Alex Amosie to help me with my business, not only is he helping me with my business, I'm also seeing how he coaches. What his mind is like, what he's doing in his own businesses, how he thinks through things when he's talking to other entrepreneurs. I'm able to learn from some of the best people in the world from the coaches that I've hired when it comes to business models, when it comes to pricing, when it comes to client acquisition, when it comes to fulfillment, when it comes to building great product, building a great service, [00:25:00] delivering, Operating the business, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: And that makes me a better coach and a more valuable consultant for the people that I work with. so anytime I invest in my skillset, that is something that no one can ever take away. I've invested over 200, 000 in my own education at this point. And that doesn't include college because I didn't go to college, but that's more than most people spend on college.

Brian: But I paid that from the profits of my business and I've made multiples of that back from my own business. And those skills can never be taken away from me. So no matter what happens to this business or the next business, I still have the skill set that I'm invested in. And so that's something that again, 2024

Brian: in the year of execution, I've just doubled down on because it's been so much better for me to just double down on somebody and go all in with them and just trust that they know better than me. And I can trust their advice. I can execute what they tell me to do. And I grow more from that versus the a la carte approach where I'm just saying, Oh, like this person's email marketing.

Brian: I like this person's paid ads. I like this person's pricing model. I like this person's, et cetera. There's still bits and pieces of that. That's inevitable. That's just part of kind of what I said earlier, where we're taking a lot of outside influences to make our businesses better. But. the person that we trust to bring it [00:26:00] all together into one big soup.

Brian: That's the important thing that I learned last year, which was just ruthlessly execute instead of constantly educating and bringing new things in my brain. So that is my four lessons from 2024 that led to such a great year without overworking or killing myself without damaging relationship, my wife. and I can't wait to see what 2025 brings.

Brian: So that's all I got for you this episode.

Brian: a reminder. If you want me to have a kind of episode on like breaking down all of the different reasons why this business is the most fundamentally sound one. I'm happy to break down all the metrics and numbers and stuff and like why it works so well. Because I do think there's a lot of takeaways, freelancers can take from this business model.

Brian: say one of the things that is most difficult for people to understand is how similar our coaching business is from a freelance business. A lot of the things that we implement and do ourselves, we directly install in other freelance businesses to great success. But I will say the industry that is most similar from a marketing perspective, is the SAS industry. That's the one that I love going to for freelancers. So if you want one sort of industry to model yourself after, it would be the software as a service industry, [00:27:00] because they have some of the smartest minds and they invest billions of dollars in that industry.

Brian: And because of that, they've come up with so many best practices. that'd be another fun episode is breaking down the SAS industry model and why it's such a good one for freelancers. email me, Brian, a six figure creative. com. I would love to hear from you on what you want, maybe in some of the upcoming episodes for this year.

Brian: That's all I got for you. See you next week on the six figure creative podcast. Bye.

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