Steal These 8 Business Lessons From WAY Smarter Industries

381. Freelance lessons I learned from other industries

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Brian: [00:00:00] The average freelancer is absolutely clueless when it comes to running a business. And I can only say this because I did some of the dumbest possible things for the first five years that I was a freelancer. I think the biggest issue is that most freelancers, you included me, especially when I first started, we looked to the left, we looked to the right, we looked to our friends and our peers as to how we should be running our business.

Brian: And this is a massive mistake because this is essentially the blind leading the blind in a lot of ways.

Brian: Now, I'm not talking about the skillset that you,perfect. Obviously, the top 1% of your skillset is gonna know what they're doing. I'm just talking about when it actually comes to running the business side of freelancing. So today I'm gonna pull lessons that I have learned personally from three other industries that I have worked in.

Brian: These are industries that are filled with way smarter people than me. And youpeople that have figured out the best way to do certain things, not because they feel like it might be a good way of doing things, not because they heard that this is a good way of doing things, not because they saw someone else doing it and they just wanted to try it, but because they spent millions of dollars, or in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars, finding the actual best practices.

Brian: these are all things that if you just pay attention to what they have already figured out, you can charge more, [00:01:00] give you more predictability in your business, have higher close rates, finished projects without tearing your hair out from the stress.

Brian: And in all the industries I'm gonna talk about today, I've built multi-six or multi seven figure businesses in all three of these industries. So I've learned this stuff firsthand by studying what the best people in the world are doing in these industries

Brian: and all the things I wanna talk about today. Every single one of them, just one of them, could make a five figure difference in your business or more. But the last one I'm gonna talk about is by far the fastest, the easiest, and the most helpful one that you could actually start implementing this month and seeing a difference in your business.

Brian: if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure creative podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers like you who are trying to sell their services and earn more money without selling their souls in the process.

Brian: if you're returning visitor or you've been here before, I'm a little sick today. Um, my voice is just like a little rough. So if you're wondering why I sound weird, that's why. But the whole point of this podcast is I bring influences from other industries into this podcast, from my experiences, from other people's experiences, from my team's experience.

Brian: In this episode, I just realized I don't really think I've ever done a dedicated episode just talking about what I've specifically learned from other industries myself [00:02:00] personally. So there's three industries I wanna talk about today. The first one is SaaS, that software as a service. The second one is hospitality.

Brian: That's an interesting one. We'll talk about more of that in a second. And the third one is kinda the info and consulting world. All three of these, again, I've, been a part of, all three of these.

Brian: I've built multi six or multi seven-figure businesses. In,

Brian: And for all these lessons I've learned some the hard way, some the easy way. But I'm hoping that you'll take what I say today and apply some of these things to your business, or at least look at your business in a different light.

Brian: So the first one I wanna talk about today is the SaaS industry. Software. As a service,

Brian: you more than likely pay for some sort of SaaS tool in your business, whether it's your CRM, whether it's your accounting tool, budgeting app, maybe you use a workout app on your phone, maybe you use a dieting app or a macro counting app.

Brian: Shout out to my macro factor fans out there. I just started using that probably a month ago. And love it.

Brian: SaaS is a massive industry. It'snot a niche anymore, it is own industry and much of the world has run off of sas. In 2015, I tried to launch my first SaaS tool. It was, it wasjust to go back in time. This is like the first side business I ever tried to launch outside of my recording studio.

Brian: And it was a business [00:03:00] in the bell bond industry. it was called Bell better. And if you know anything about the bell bond industry in the US it's, massive. It's like multi-billion dollar industry, but it's all like mom and pop bell bond agencies bailing people outta jail and they don't have sort of central tool to actually run their business.

Brian: Basically a CRM for bell bonds companies. So me and my best friend Trevor, we like hustled, like went to different places to try to like,talk them into pre-buying our software as we like,started to build it out based on whatthey were saying and wanting ultimately didn't pan out.

Brian: But that was my first foray into trying to make that work. And there's a lot of reasons I could go into lessons why that didn't work. But it's largely irrelevant. But the first SaaS tool that we actually built, it was still me and Trevor that actually worked, was called File Paths and File Paths still around today, still doing great today, still over six figures today.

Brian: And that is a file sharing tool for the audio industry specifically. It's kinda like Dropbox for audio and a lot of specialized tools and use cases around audio, specifically audio engineers, some podcasts, producers use it, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: And straight off the bat, the whole reason the SaaS industry blew up, it's just [00:04:00] software. Software's been around for freaking ever, like Microsoft was selling software, in the nineties for likeearly Windows products. But why SaaS blew up from probably 2010 on until now and still huge, is because of the power of recurring revenue.

Brian: This is the first big lesson that I learned in the SaaS world, is how powerful recurring revenue is. In the freelance world, one-off projects are the norm. It's almost always the case. There are some cases where just the nature of your world, your niche, your industry, and your service, it's a recurring revenue thing, like podcast editors, recurring revenue.

Brian: Great, you already understand this, but most freelancers are one and done and one-off Projects tend to suck because they're inconsistent. They're good because it's,usually a big dollar amount. You get big lump sums all the time, so you can have really good months when you get two or three projects or three or four projects all in one together.

Brian: But then it can be really bad for a long time because there's no consistency. You just have clients that are like paying you once and then goodbye, and this is literally what leads to the feast or famine cycle that most freelancers deal with. But with a SaaS tool, again, file pass. We had recurring revenue and when recurring revenue came predictability and with predictability, it made it easy for us to [00:05:00] budget because we knew how much we were gonna make every month, and we could pretty well predict how much more we were gonna earn the next month based on our revenue growth.

Brian: It was an easy paycheck for me and my co-founder because we knew how much we could take from the company without bankrupting it, because we knew how much was coming in. We knew how much was going out and expenses. We knew how much growth we were gonna have. So easy paycheck for us, and then easy in reinvestment.

Brian: We knew if we needed to buy something or reinvest in something, we just did a massive design overhaul. We paid a lot of money for easy to reinvest because we know what money's coming in, we know what's in savings. It's just really easy to run a business like that, but it does suck early on when you're first building up your MRR, again, your monthly recurring revenue is the term MRR, because generally file pass, I think the average user's probably like 25, 30 bucks, something like that.

Brian: When you have a hundred customers, you might have 2500, 30 $500 a month. That's not very much.

Brian: And when you first launch something like that, or when you first move, if you were to go just for straight one-off projects to just recurring revenue, it can be a bit of a hit because you don't get that big cash influx. You're slowly building this like baseline, this floor that's going up and up and up.

Brian: And for the [00:06:00] first while until you hit your call it your freedom number or yourjust your bill pay number, it can be very challenging for people to make that transition. and so there's a lot of case studies in the software world they were on the model where they would release new versions, get a big cash influx one time for that year, or however long it took to develop it.

Brian: And then they're not gonna see any more money until the next year we're launchthe new version that's like the waterfall kind of software method. And they were used to these big cash influxes, and when they went to recurring revenue, they struggled. They didn't like it because it was likea small amount of money for a while, and they needed the big cash influx to keep that cycle going.

Brian: So in freelance world, there are a number of ways to do this. We actually have a full episode on this. We

Brian: actually two episodes. The series, offering recurring subscriptions as a freelancer, the Holy Grail of Freelancing, that's episode 3 0 6. again, you can get to it by just going to six figure creative.com/ 3 0 6 to get to that episode, and then right after it, episode 3 0 7 is seven pricing strategies for recurring Subscription Freelance clients.

Brian: So that's kind a one two punch for those of you that are looking to get into this. there's a model that I really like that's kinda a hybrid model, and that is where you have an upfront payment. You have a long-term recurring payment [00:07:00] and you can adjust the ratios depending on your niche or your offer.

Brian: Some industries where like, let's just say you're in web design, it might be a big upfront, you might get five or $10,000 to make a new website, and then on the back end you might have a very small, relatively small one, $200 a month kind of maintenance, or maybe even three or $400 a month depending on what you're doing.

Brian: If you're doing like CRO or some sort of like long term thing where you're doing stuff over and over again, but you can have the best of both worlds doing a hybrid model like that where you're getting the big upfront and then the long term tail. Sometimes you can do a big upfront and a big long term.

Brian: Sometimes it's just a small upfront with a big,higher monthly recurring revenue.

Brian: But that's the first big lesson that I learned is just. Recurring revenue, if that can be fit into your business model in any way, shape or form, absolutely do it because it is a game changer. When you get clients on recurring revenue. It is such a peace of mind that you get, because you're not having to go find new clients every month or new customers every month, whatever your terminology is, and software, it's customers or users, and the freelance world is gonna be clients.

Brian: And there's a book, an older book called Automatic Customer, it's basically just talking about the power of recurring revenue. It's basically when you have a, a subscription [00:08:00] customer or client that's an automatic customer they're an automatic customer until they decide they don't wanna be a customer anymore.

Brian: So instead of having to sell them every month, they're already sold. They have to decide every month if they want to actually cancel, which is actually, depending on how much value you add, it can be very sticky.

Brian: The second big lesson I learned from the SaaS industry was the metrics of session. think this is one of the coolest things the SaaS industry did to my brain was just help me understand what metrics matter, why they matter, and why I should track them, and how I should obsess over those things. So now if you saw my master spreadsheet for six figure creative, it is wild.

Brian: It is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lines of metrics that I update every single day. And I actually have an episode on this, on the podcast. I have like an episode of about damn near everything.

Brian: This is episode 3 81. So chances are I've talked about this already, but, episode 3 32. It's called seven Must Track Metrics that will make you More Money in 2025, and those metrics will still be relevant in 20 26, 20 27, 20 28, and likely beyond. Until AI takes all of our jobs.

Brian: Just [00:09:00] kidding, it probably won't, but We'll see.Maybe we shouldn't have upset on that,

Brian: but the main metrics the SaaS industry obsess over, and the first ones I kind of really learned

Brian: The first one is LTV, that stands for lifetime value and that is essentially how much is one customer or client worth to you over the lifetime of that client. this number matters for freelancers, whether it's a subscription or just a one-off project. If you only have, let's just say you're a wedding photographer.

Brian: You only really work with one client or one couple and do their wedding, and chances are they're not gonna hire you again and maybe you charge five, $10,000 for a wedding. Well then your LTV for a client is five or $10,000. Cool. That's not really gonna change in the music production space, which is my background.

Brian: there are plenty of people that do recurring subscriptions on that. We can talk about that in the future episode if you guys care. But it was almost all one-off projects for me, but it was reoccurring. So recurring is monthly on a ongoing basis. Or yearly. Or annually or whatever.

Brian: Reoccurring is over and over, but not on a basis that can be tracked. So like when you buy Coca-Cola, you might buy one today, you might buy one Thursday, you might buy one six months from now. I haven't have Coca-Cola since I was [00:10:00] 17, so I'm not a, I'm not a reoccurring customer for Coca-Cola, But I had reoccurring customers or clients in the music production world, and LTV would be tracked by how many times did a band come back to me throughout the lifetime? Or how many songs did they record me throughout their lifetime? How many songs did I mix for them throughout the lifetime? How much is one band worth to me?

Brian: And luckily, I got into my CRM, I used close IO at the time, it's close.com now. And that CRM actually tracked LTV and helped me understand which of my clients were worth way more money.

Brian: And this is important for a lot of things, but it's really important for this next metric which is cac, CAC,customer acquisition cost or client acquisition cost. And that is the cost to acquire one customer or one client. And in the freelance world, there's kind of two costs associated with acquiring a customer.

Brian: There is, time, and then there's money, and then there's referrals. I'm gonna get into that in a second. Because that doesn't really cost you time or money, although you can again, encourage referrals. That can cost time. It can cost money. You can ssend gifts. You can do a bunch of things around getting more referrals.

Brian: But generally we're talking about money. If you did [00:11:00] like YouTube content or social media content and you're looking at like, Hey, I spend six hours on content a month and my time is worth 50 bucks an hour, then I spend $300 of my time per month on acquiring customers. I get two customers a month or two clients a month, so my customer acquisition cost is 150 bucks.

Brian: That'd be like a way to factor that in when you just are spending time on it. When you're spending money, it's how much money do I spend to get a client? That would be through paid ads. That would be through referral partners. If you're giving like a kickback to somebody for sending you referrals, and this is where these two metrics matter the most together.

Brian: What's the lifetime value of a client? What is the cost to acquire that client?

Brian: this is especially important if you run ads, because in the music production space, there might be a client worth a thousand dollars. They came to me to do one song, it was a thousand bucks, or, $1,500 or $2,000, however long it takes to do the, uh, single.

Brian: And if I were doing paid ads at the time, maybe it cost me a thousand dollars to get that customer or that client, that's not very good. I'm spending all or at least half of my money to acquire a customer, and then I'm spending my time to fulfill on the service. That's just awful. But then [00:12:00] we realize actually the client will come back to me 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 more times throughout the lifetime of me working with them.

Brian: So that customer is actually worth 10, 15, $20,000. Now, am I willing to trade a thousand dollars for a $20,000 customer? Yes. Every day. And so in the SaaS world, they look at the ratio between lifetime value and customer acquisition cost. And that is one of the most important marketing metrics for the SaaS industry.

Brian: And for them it's like a three to one. And there's some caveats with that that don't really matter for this episode. but if you can get a customer that's worth, let's say, a thousand dollars lifetime, and you can spend $333 to get that customer, then that is a good thing that you can just throw money into for the rest of your life.

Brian: but the third metric that I learned in the SaaS world is something called churn.

Brian: Churn is how many of your clients or customers do you retain on a monthly or annual basis? And this is really easy to track in a subscription kind of business because you can say, if I had a hundred customers. Starting this month and next month, only 97 of those are remaining. Then three of those left, that's a 3% monthly churn rate.

Brian: That's pretty good in most industries. 3%

Brian: on the high side, you [00:13:00] might have 10%. On the low side, you might have 1% on the medium side, around 5%, but churn is a huge predictor of lifetime value when it comes to a recurring revenue type business. I'm not gonna get into the math behind it. ultimately not a big deal right now, but the thing I want to think about with churn is churn is an indicator of how happy your clients are.

Brian: If they're paying you monthly and they're canceling at a higher rate, they're not getting enough value to warrant them continue to pay you every month, which means you need to improve the value that you're providing to your clients. It's the same in the software world, it's the same in the freelance world.

Brian: It's the same in any world. If there's a recurring revenue thing and they're canceling, it's because they didn't get the value out of the product that they're buying. And that's a signal to yourself to improve your own skills, your client experience, your own systems, your revisions process, your communications process, how you're talking to your clients, your own, attitude maybe.

Brian: But there's also a way to look at churn on an annual basis if you have a reoccurring business. So it's much more difficult to track and it may be more manual than just looking at like how many clients are still left at the end of the month in the studio world, you might [00:14:00] lose a client for one of two reasons.

Brian: Reason number one is the band broke up, in which case not always bad because a lot of times the band will splinter into multiple bands. And those multiple bands are now your customers. It's like getting two Christmases in a divorce. Now you have different bands, two different clients out of one splitting apart.

Brian: That's a good thing. That would be called negative churn. I lost a client and gained two more. Wonderful. The other way you you lose a client is if they. Go to someone else, go to another studio, go to another producer. That's bad churn. That is true churn. you might start to see like, how many of my clients that work with me this year come back to me again next year?

Brian: And what I learned is about 70% was the number for me.

Brian: give or take a little bit.

Brian: But the higher that number, the more satisfied your clients are with you. That means you have a good service. That means your clients are satisfied with the amount of value they're getting for what they pay you. And there's nothing to change. But if none of your clients are coming back to you, that's a red flag.

Brian: That means either you're attracting really bad fit leads that you don't wanna work with. It could be that you are just underwhelming your clients and there's a better value for them somewhere else. But when you obsess, overturn, that allows you to make your process better. And then there's one more fourth metric that I learned and this metric obsession that the SaaS world has, and that's [00:15:00] something called NPS Net Promoter Score.

Brian: It is literally just a rating from like one to 10 on how likely you are to refer, the service or product to someone else. Now, I don't really care about NPS specifically, but what I like about NPS is it is a just one metric to look at, to say, how happy are my clients right now or my customers right now?

Brian: the higher that number, the better job you're doing. so I've talked about this on past episodes where.

Brian: It's really important to gather feedback from your clients. Episode 2 99. It's why you should ask your clients for feedback after every single project. And the thought process is here, you're able to address things right now. The problem with churn is it is a reactive measure. So a client comes to you, especially on a reoccurring basis.

Brian: Like let's just say you work with, a client and they come to you for one project, and then it'll be a year before the next project happens. If you wait until the next year to see that they didn't come back to you, and then with someone else, that means that you didn't know for an entire year that they were unhappy.

Brian: But with an NPS score or some sort of feedback or survey, you send your clients after project's done or just asking for feedback, you're able to figure out how happy or unhappy with my clients, withwhat I did [00:16:00] for them. And the good thing about it, like a one to 10 rating, is that it's one of those things that.

Brian: Clients may not give you good, honest feedback if you directly ask for it. they just wanna be nice, but they may be willing on a survey tool to just put an honest number in there. It's just easy to put a six in there. And then anything below an,a nine, so like an eight and below, you can ask for additional feedback.

Brian: So I have something pop up. Hey, anything else you wanna add here to get some real feedback from people? And we do this for all of our clients. We survey people all the time to figure out what they're struggling with, what they're not liking. this lets us talk to our clients about it.

Brian: This lets us address the issues long term, short term, but I learned this again from the software as a service world, is that metrics obsession. So again, the SaaS world, I've learned the power of recurring revenue. I've learned the metrics obsession. And the third thing was the product obsession. The product obsession is something that you do not see in many other industries. But the SaaS world is obsessed with building a good product. They build, they measure, and they adjust. And if you read any sort of like, product building type of books in the SaaS world, they have all sorts of crazy ways that they do this.

Brian: they'll do [00:17:00] cohort analysis, they'll do user studies and, interviews with people to figure out what they actually need versus what they think they want. They obsess over this stuff and it's entire career paths and departments dedicated to the product itself.

Brian: And I like this because no matter what, if you're selling your service or you're selling a widget or a physical product, or a digital product, or a course, or a coaching program, or you're selling lawn care, Or a recurring revenue or a one-off, you're still selling some sort of product. you've probably heard people talk about productized services for freelancers. That should be a really good thought that like, if it's a productized service, I'm essentially packaging up a service as if it's a product.

Brian: Therefore, maybe I should have a product obsession. Maybe I should see based on what changes I make to the product, what are the results that my clients are getting? What's yielding a better result for them? What's yielding fewer revisions from them? What's yielding higher ratings from my clients based on the feedback that I'm getting from them?

Brian: What yields lower churn for my clients based on how long they're sticking around? What increases lifetime value with my clients? based on how long they stick around on a recurring basis, or how often they come back to me on a reoccurring basis.

Brian: But the cool [00:18:00] thing about the SaaS world is all these things play together. The NPS or surveying your clients allows you to get feedback. On being able to make a better product so that you can increase your LTV and decrease your CAC because you're getting so many referrals from people that decreases blended cac.

Brian: Am I gonna get,am I gonna get into the blended CAC conversation? Decreases, churn increases. NPS, like all these things are an ecosystem in the software world,

Brian: and the reason they've become this sophisticated is because they have some of the greatest minds making millions of dollars by solving these problems. People going out of college, going straight into the SaaS world and building out really good, cool best practices and frameworks to solve some of these problems that the,freelance world can just directly rip off and just take to the bank.

Brian: That is one of my favorite industries, is the SaaS world when it comes to freelancers, and I hope you'll start studying more into the SaaS world and bring takeaways for your own business. The second industry I wanna talk about is the hospitality industry.

Brian: This was my first real revenue stream after my studio. Now my first attempted revenue stream was Bell Better. [00:19:00] The Bell Bond software as a service failure. The first SaaS tool that worked was File Pass, but before File Pass was actually for me, Airbnb.

Brian: And I just had a unicorn of a lucky ass situation where I rented a place in downtown Nashville off of Craigslist, sight unseen, no photos, just a description. And the description on Craigslist said Three beds, two baths, kitchen, music studio. That's all it said. And so I drove from Alabama to Nashville. The second I saw it, I called him up.

Brian: He was willing to show it to me, and I was instantly sold on it. It was $1,250 a month. It was three blocks from Broadway, and I lived there for about a decade,

Brian: I ran my studio out of it. I built my first course out of it, and I built my first new income stream out of it. That wasn't a studio, which was Airbnb. this is before all the regulations were in place, all the permitting processes in place.

Brian: This is the Wild West Days.

Brian: And what I eventually found out was that I had a gold mine on my hands, and I could rent this thing out for about $1,200 a night. On the [00:20:00] weekends and then work out of it during the week in my normal studio. So I basically had double income. I had a lot of money on the weekends and a lot of money during the week.

Brian: And it was wonderful. I did this for about three years before all the regulation stuff came in place and it got clamped down. But what I learned during that time was in order to run a very successful one of the top earning Airbnbs in Nashville at the time

Brian: was the bar for perfection was so high. ' people are comparing this to other Airbnbs in the area to hotels that could stay at.

Brian: And so with the bar being very high, this is where my perfectionism shined,

Brian: But the problem with perfectionism is I also have a DHD, and when A DHD becomes distractions and forgetting things, and so through the hospitality industry, I learned about SOPs, standard operating procedures, basically checklists. And I learned that your perfectionism can be documented into a checklist, and your perfectionism can be a wonderful superpower when done right.

Brian: And SOPs absolutely help with your perfectionism. But also perfectionism can cripple you by moving too slowly. This is [00:21:00] in the studio world. I would move too slowly in the Airbnb world. I moved too slowly. Ittake me too long to turnover is what they call it.

Brian: Turnover. the unit between people staying. And the key here that I learned was My perfectionism and I turned it into, I have a binder, it's in my closet over there. I couldprobably should have pulled it out, but it was literally a binder with laminated pages. There was a, whiteboard marker that you could check off on the laminated pages and then easily erase it when you were done.

Brian: Every single thing that had to be done in the Airbnb in order to have a five star experience from the time the person checked out until the time the next person checked in And that allowed me to hand it off to someone else. I didn't have to do the cleaning. we had all sorts of things in there from like,how to clean the bathroom, how to clean the toilet, how to make sure not a single hair was left within sight anywhere in the entire unit.

Brian: Hairs were a big thing for me. It's like if I see a single hair, that's where my perfectionism is. Like, hell no. I don't wanna see a hair in my Airbnb. That's disgusting. we would buy local beers and local cupcakes. Give them to our guests because that little surprise and delight doesn't cost us much money.

Brian: And as much as we're charging per night, we can afford it.

Brian: And it led to [00:22:00] us having dozens and dozens and maybe hundreds of five star reviews from people, which just shot us up the rankings with that many five star reviews.

Brian: this leads me to my second lesson that I learned in the hospitality industry, and that is the power of a niche and the pricing power of a niche. So you heard what I was charging 1200 a night. I wasn't able to charge 1200 a night because I was just a generalist. Airbnb, the generalist Airbnbs were basically this, it was like a two bedroom apartment in the downtown area, walk up to Broadway.

Brian: It would be, basic decor or even nice decor.

Brian: It'll be charged around two to 300 a night. Something like that. That's kinda like the basic one. And that's where you might have a couple, two couples staying there. You might have a small family staying there. And there were like hundreds of those to choose from. My niche. I was a specialist. I had a specialist Airbnb, and I had pricing to match that.

Brian: And I would go after a market that nobody wanted. I had a bachelor party, Airbnb, and I would've let anybody stay there and it had 10 beds in it, and you could do whatever you wanted in it. And generally, people were,kept it pretty tidy, [00:23:00] pretty nice. Sometimes they relatively trash it. At one point somebody passed out and peed on a rug.

Brian: Another point somebody passed out and fell into our TV and broke it. the tenants covered all those things. And even if they didn't, it was still so profitable, I would've gladly bottled those things again and just kept doing the same thing.

Brian: but because nobody wanted this market, I could jack up my price and I knew that $1,200 a night split between 10 guys for the bachelor party, it's no big deal. Each guy pitches in a couple hundred bucks to stay near Broadway. Just walk to Broadway.

Brian: You don't have to worry about Ubers or taxis. Be close to the actions. Let's talk about how this relates to freelancers.

Brian: In the freelance world, a lot of you're trying to be that generalist. You're trying to be the safe thing, the family, Airbnb, the two bedroom, one and a half bath,

Brian: you're afraid of taking on this specific type of client, or you don't want to be lumped in with this type of thing because you might lose out on all these other ones. I never had a single family. I might have had one family stay with me. It's like a,Thanksgiving thing. And they had a big family and they cook there.

Brian: I was making so much money I didn't care.

Brian: And there are niches out there as a freelancer that you can fall into that are relatively blue oceans. Like [00:24:00] for me, the bachelor party was a relatively blue ocean.

Brian: And the feeling of being in a niche that is truly a blue ocean, where it's not red, full of blood, everyone attacking each other, trying to get to the meat, the chum bucket, the feeling of those two things is just a crazy difference. in the software world, they call it product market fit.

Brian: If you don't have product market fit, it's gonna look like this. You're gonna hustle all day, you're gonna try your damnedest. You're gonna barely scrape by to get new users or new,customers, they're not gonna stick around very long. Your churn's gonna be very high. Your LT v's gonna be very high. Your, customer acquisition costs are gonna be very high.

Brian: It's just gonna feel like shit the entire time. When you have product market fit or you find a blue ocean in the, in the SaaS world, things start to click, growth starts to happen, the hockey stick curve starts to occur. And in the freelance world, there are similar signs when you have nailed it.

Brian: And when you are just fighting upstream, struggling right now, and a lot of you are in that upstream battle where you are fighting tooth and nail to get the one or two clients because you just refuse to actually ever plant your flag somewhere and say, this is my niche. You don't build case studies and any specific niche.

Brian: [00:25:00] You have your case studies thrown in a bunch of different areas.

Brian: You don't focus on how you can create the best,product and experience for that specific niche.

Brian: Like when I was working with bachelor parties, the decor was for bachelor parties. The funny signs I put everywhere were the humor that Bachelors would find funny, not families.

Brian: And so it allowed me to do things that I could not do if I was trying to appeal to everyone. And in your freelance business, if it feels like that, you're likely trying to appeal to everyone, and thus you're just pushing away more and more people.

Brian: so that's the hospitality industry. The things I learned were, again, SOPs for consistently great results and essentially operationalizing my perfectionism so that I wasn't overdoing it, but I also wasn't underdoing it and I wasn't letting my A DHD distract me from the things that really mattered.

Brian: ' cause you know about A DHD and you get hyper fixation and perfectionism, those two things are horrible together. and the next thing is the power of the niche. That's the two lessons from hospitality. The third industry I wanna talk about is kind of the info world or consulting world. And just to know my background on this, I launched my first course late 2015.

Brian: And that was a course about mixing and [00:26:00] mastering heavy metal. It was called From Shit to Gold.

Brian: then another course in the recording Studio World 2019. And now in the consulting world, clients by Design, which is, we call it a coaching program, but really it's a consulting program. think the difference between a coach and consulting is like semantics, but a coach is more about like hoorah, like, be better.

Brian: Here's your, proper way to,curl, a dumbbell, you know? But a consultant is more like, here's some frameworks to actually follow. Here's actually the best practices. Here's what we think. It's more of a strategic partner, and that's more how we operate.

Brian: But in a sentence, clients by design is a. Client acquisition coaching program slash consultancy.

Brian: and there's three lessons I wanna talk through that I've learned from this world. 'cause this is something that is, I eat, breathe, and sleep this every day. 'cause now six figure creative is my main thing. It's grown to the multi seven figure range.

Brian: And I have ato me, a large team. It's the largest company I've ever been a part of. I've never had a real job before. So this is all new to me. But what I learned in this world, the first thing is offer creation. think Alex Ram Mosey kind of blew this up with a hundred million dollar offers.

Brian: But the thing that we see in the kind of freelance or creative [00:27:00] agency niche is that it's rife with what I call like inbred offers or no offers at all. And what I mean by inbred offers is like you just are selling packages. There's no real offer here. You're selling packages or services. But Hermo has the whole book on creating offers and the elements basically boil down to this.

Brian: what is your core promise? Not a service, but what's your,core promise that your service solves? What do they actually get? Again, what are the deliverables that you do to get that end product or the end result? What are the bonuses attached to that? And this is one of the things that I really struggle with when I first read that book.

Brian: I was like, bonuses. Like,that works in like the courses world, but likethis doesn't really work in a service-based business. I've kind of come around that, 'cause I've learned that like.Bonuses can be a lot of things and they can be positioned as something else, like included extras or a launch kit or implementation tool or some other thing that you give, uh, support package.

Brian: You can call it whatever you want, but it's what are the things that you also include that take none of your time away from you that are added reasons that your client might wanna work with you versus someone else. And the cool thing about this as being part of your offer is it creates what we [00:28:00] call offer confusion.

Brian: And this is something that you absolutely don't see in freelancers. I'm only go on Fiverr right now, and I, I was looking up,web designers, every one of 'em would be basically the same thing. And the only thing they're differentiating is the amount of reviews they have, social proof and the price of their service.

Brian: That's basically the only two differentiators on there, apple to apples comparison between the two. And obviously it's a portfolio that's like the third factor and arguably the most important. But when you have. Offer confusion. It makes it so that you can't just directly compare apples to apples.

Brian: Maybe the portfolios are similar. Maybe the pricing is similar, but this person has all these extras, this launch kit or this implementation kit the support package that he's giving away is all these things that I know I'm gonna need once my website's done, or all these things I know I'm gonna need when my music is produced, or all these things I know I'm gonna need when my brand is,done.

Brian: So bonuses can be a wonderful part of an offer if done correctly, and you can do all these one-time resources. You build one time that you can just give to every single client. It's wonderful. The next factor in the a hundred million dollar offers kind of framework istimeframe. So how long does it take to deliver the service to get to the outcome?

Brian: And then what sort of risk [00:29:00] reversal can you attach to that? Meaning if we don't hit this outcome, what can you do to take some of the risk off your shoulders? Now this is an interesting one with risk reversal. If you are the top of your game. A huge name in your industry. Like some of our music producer clients are huge.

Brian: Like we have people that have worked with some of the biggest artists in the world, that have headlined Super Bowl, halftime show. And those people don't necessarily need a risk reversal. Risk reversal is when you are newer or you are unproven, or you were just another faceless person in a sea of people and you're trying to get people to give you a chance and they're like, why should I trust you versus someone else?

Brian: And risk averse just saying, I can deliver on the result and if I don't, I'll give a refund or I'll work for free until we get there. Or in some cases you'll see this in, in more in the course world than anywhere else, but I'll give you double your money back, something really enticing. So risk reversal is a gradient and the more risky it seems to work with you versus someone else, the more risk reversal youyou'll need.

Brian: The more proven you are, the less risky it looks to work with you, the less you need this risk reversal. And the final element of the [00:30:00] hundred million dollar office framework is proof. What sort of proof do you have that you can deliver on what you say you can do? It's basically boils down to this, who's this for? Plus the dream outcome plus the timeframe minus whatever big sacrifice they would have to do normally, plus the guarantees slash risk reversal. And then you just wanna ladder that shit in proof. That's the summation of it.

Brian: And this can take a lot of time, effort, energy. This is one of the biggest areas we help clients with because it's so much like back and forth trying to figure out all this different elements for your specific offer.

Brian: And not all of those things will fit for every industry. So we've gotta be able to adapt. And nothing's worse than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't work for some people. But for most freelancers, there is a way to create an offer that differentiates you from everyone else.

Brian: And I didn't learn this until I got into the info and consulting world,

Brian: and this can have a huge difference for how you message what you do, how you price, what you do. 'cause it's easier to tie this to value-based pricing. A lot of freelancers, they say, I love the idea of value-based pricing. I love detaching my time from how much I'm getting paid.

Brian: But then they struggle on how they actually make that transition. [00:31:00] And creating an actual offer on what you do and packaging that up is a wonderful way to do this.

Brian: The second big thing I learned in the info and consulting world is the power of paid ads. Now we have a whole episode on this.

Brian: I actually have three episodes on this episode, 3 46, 3 47, and 3 53. We have one about the $3 a day paid ad strategy that could change your business. We have 3 47, which is before spending $1 on paid ads. Ask yourself these six questions. That's probably the one I'd recommend the most, after this section in episode 3 53.

Brian: The unexpected benefits of paid ads, and it's more than just leads. so I've talked about this before so I'm not gonna harp on this too long, but the thing I learned about paid ads when it comes to the info consulting world is when you have a scalable business, meaning the limitation is not your time.

Brian: Now you gotta figure out how large can I grow this? So in the course world, I did this in the consulting world with six figure credit. We spent a lot on paid ads.

Brian: But the reason I never really did this in the freelance world is because I had pretty good consistency from word of mouth.

Brian: Because in the music producer world, if you're in high demand, you have a good sound that people want the songs that you produce basically advertise you. You'll be credited in the credits [00:32:00] on Spotify or on the back of an album. So other clients will see that and they'll wanna hire you to do the same thing you did for them.

Brian: So the marketing piece isn't the huge limiting factor. It's more about time, how much scheduling you can do, et cetera, et cetera. But what I learned as I moved into the consulting world is that the industry works much different where a lot of freelancers, they don't have the word of mouth loop built up yet, word of mouth snowball is what I call it.

Brian: Or they don't have any sort of social following, which I did have at the time, they don't have any sort of larger network, which I did have because I had been in a band touring for years and I was heavily involved in my music scene. I was in a show promoter. I would actually put on, concerts.

Brian: I called 'em shows ' cause it's like metal shows. But I was like a staple in my industry, in my area especially. But that grew out from there. But a lot of people don't have that. So there comes a time where the only way that you're able to grow. You've tapped out your network. The clients that you have, maybe they don't come back to you often enough to actually be full-time yet, even if they come back to you, maybe it's once a year, once every other year.

Brian: The only real options you have are cold outreach or paid ads, something to get strangers to hire you.

Brian: the reason freelancers never use this [00:33:00] is because they never see anyone doing this. And the reason they never see anyone doing this is because no one ever does it. the same issue we see in a lot of freelance businesses. When I said the average freelancer has no clue what they're doing, when you look at an industry and say, no one in my industry does this. Is that a good excuse for why you shouldn't do it too? If anything, if I see something that works in virtually every other industry.

Brian: And no one's doing it. In my small corner of the world, I look at that as two thumbs up as to why I should at least try it. Because that means I'm gonna be first to market. I'm gonna be first doing it, I'm gonna be the wanna get the most benefits from it. And as I start doing it more, other people are gonna start doing it.

Brian: It's gonna make it less effective and over time it's gonna be diminishing returns. I started working with music producers first, and then we've expanded to other niches as we've grown and expanded and built our team out and have a lot more experience. But music producers were the first for us to work with as around paid ads specifically.

Brian: And no one was doing it in that world. And now it's way more common because they see our clients doing it and other people start doing it. And so I'm not saying it's saturated, it's by far not saturated in the music industry yet, but it's way more common now. You'll see this a lot more. So the taboo that was originally there [00:34:00] that would hold people back from doing, 'cause they didn't wanna look desperate, they don't wanna look cringe or whatever.

Brian: That's all gone now. So now it's completely normal in our industry to do that. And you'll see some of the bigger name people running ads for different things that are doing they're starting to understand the power of it.

Brian: So again, offer creation is the first thing I learned in the info and consulting world. The second thing was the power of paid ads. And the third big lesson I've learned, and this is the one that I think every freelancer could start doing this month if you're not already doing it, and you would see a massive boost to this if you do it right.

Brian: And that is doing phone sales. I never did phone sales until six figure creative. My freelance business was a hundred percent email via quotes. A band would reach out how much I'd have them fill out my inquiry form based on the inquiry form. I would send out a quote. In an email. No specific proposals, nothing beautiful.

Brian: Just a template. That said, thanks for the being interested. I should find my own quote template 'cause it's probably pretty funny, All right. I paused and I found a quote that I sent out. This was sent on March 14th, 2011. This is when I had just moved to Nashville.

Brian: they'd filled out the inquiry form. I got all the information and no proposal, [00:35:00] no phone call, no phone sales. All I said was I charge a flat $300 per eight hour day, and that includes a place to stay while you're recording, which saves you guys 50 to $100 per night on a hotel. My building is a 2,600 square foot facility.

Brian: this is actually before I moved to Nashville. My building is a 2,600 square foot facility. With a bedroom with bunk beds for bands, bathroom with a shower, full kitchen wifi, and a lounge with 73 inch, 10 80 p flat screen and surround sound as well as an Xbox 360 NP S3.

Brian: I knew the key to band guy's hearts. Most bands take at least one to two days per song for tracking and it takes me about one eight hour day for every three songs to do editing, mixing and mastering a 40% deposit is required to book the dates. Lemme know if you have any other questions.

Brian: That was my quote process that I would send out before I ever learned how to do phone sales.

Brian: I did that for way too long and I missed out on a lot of money and my close rates were like 20%.

Brian: And there's so much to dissect of the things that are wrong in that,in pricing scheme, the quote [00:36:00] process, whatever. But that was 2011. That was my, the beginning of my third year of freelancing. And that is further proof that the average freelancer has no idea what they're doing.

Brian: let's talk about, am I saying phone sales is like a big thing I learned? It's because when you do phone sales discovery calls, you wanna call 'em whatever you want. You're on a phone call or in person, any sort of real synchronous thing. in person's preferred. Zoom is second best. A phone call, its third best But the first reason is it is just better at weeding out bad fits. There's a lot of clients that I likely worked with that I probably wouldn't have worked with had I actually had a conversation with them and it would save me a lot of heartache and pain could have filtered those people out ahead of time a lot better than I did just through email.

Brian: The second big reason is it helps build trust with the good fits the people that are a good fit that you actually wanna work with that are like, especially those like bigger end projects that I, I was trying to close through email. I could have had a way better job building the trust up for 'em to feel confident that I was the right fit for them, and I missed out on projects that I could have otherwise gotten.

Brian: That could have even changed the trajectory of my career had I done a phone conversation with them versus trying to close 'em over email like an idiot.

Brian: The [00:37:00] third big benefit of doing phone sales is you actually know you're, why you're not getting clients. when I sent quotes out to clients, that email. If they never responded back, yeah, I'd follow up. 'cause I had a CRM and I was at least halfway smart in that world, although I don't think I had a CRM until 2014.

Brian: So I probably missed out on a ton of money before then.

Brian: But they would ghost me and I'd have no idea why. Whether I followed up or not, I'd have no idea why they didn't go with me.

Brian: But when you're on a phone conversation, you can ask questions, you can get clarification, you can figure out why they're not gonna hire you. It could just be money. It could be they're gonna go with someone else. It could be they're just not ready yet, and you do need to follow up aggressively until they are actually ready.

Brian: But you can actually learn and adjust and adapt things. One of the biggest things that I've seen in the freelance world is that people are missing out on projects because of their pricing. And it's not because they are. Trying to make too much money per hour

Brian: It's because they're taking way too long to deliver the same exact product that someone else delivers. And that's that perfectionism conversation I talked about earlier in this episode. Some people are just such a perfectionist that they spend three, four, or five times longer to deliver. The exact same end [00:38:00] product is somebody who can make decisions, somebody who has the right amount of perfectionism that is perfectly directed and gets the perfect end result based on how much time they spend on it.

Brian: And because they do it two or three or four times faster, they can be 20, 30, 40, 50% lower on the overall pricing and still come out ahead of you on hourly rate. And that is a big thing that people don't understand in the freelance world, is it's not just a flat price and that's it. A lot of it is you can actually compete on price to some extent, but then come out ahead of everyone else because you were more efficient than everyone else, and you found a way to deliver faster, better, or at least the same for less time.

Brian: And those are the sorts of insights that when you consistently see somebody charging less than you and then you realize they're just doing it faster than you. Now you can actually make adjustments. Whereas if they just ghost you because you didn't do phone sales, I'm not gonna go to this guy's way too expensive.

Brian: You never learn that. Now, I'm not just saying lower your price and compete on price. This is a whole other side tangent. I'm just saying with a phone conversation, you can learn why someone didn't hire you with an email or through text or through [00:39:00] some other medium. You're not gonna actually get to the true end result of why they didn't hire you, the true reason that they didn't actually go with you.

Brian: And the last reason, this is the biggest reason why phone sales are superior, is your close rates are higher. At the end of the day, if you have a good sales process in place, more eyeballs are gonna turn into more money. I talk about this on episode.

Brian: 361. The episode title was he had 20,000 website visitors and a broken sales process. it was about sales efficiency. It was a whole episode talking about a guy who had tons and tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, and he could not properly convert those into dollars at the end of the funnel. And it was because his sales process was horrible. He was not doing phone sales. He was trying to do basically like self-serve, check out on the site.

Brian: And at the end of the day if you strip away all the creativity, all of the light junk around the creative side, and you just look at your freelance business objectively. You have a certain amount of eyeballs that are checking you out, that are interested in you. They're checking out on socials, they're following you, they're liking things, certain amount of people visiting your website, certain amount of people maybe talking about you, considering you.

Brian: And then on the other end of all the other [00:40:00] shit involved with that, there's a certain amount of money that comes out the other side. And objectively, the better your sales process, the more of those eyeballs and considers will turn into dollars in your bank account, and you'll have a better time in your business.

Brian: Now, when we start throwing all the creativity on there and all the junk that brings, You're scared to do a phone sale. You're scared to talk numbers, you're scared to talk money, and I completely understand it, but it doesn't have to be scary and the benefits outweigh the costs associated with it.

Brian: So this is one of the number one things I recommend anyone do Try to do phone sales of some sort. Now, the only, except there's a few exceptions, it's when you're hyper button seat and low dollar, and your clients are higher end people and they don't have time to get on a phone call with little old you, that can be a exception where maybe phone sales aren't the best for you.

Brian: But I'm talking about when you are a truly like a partner with someone, a transformational service, and especially higher income, higher value freelancers. Absolutely. Every single client you work with have to do phone sales.

Brian: And if you can't, maybe there's a language barrier. Maybe you're not a native English speaker, maybe you're on the other side of the world. My heart goes out to you because you're, hurting [00:41:00] yourself by not being able to do phone sales. It's not like it can't be done, by the way, I did it for years.

Brian: You're not gonna die, but you're gonna be making less money than you could. And for some of you, that can be the difference between making your freelance business work and it not working.

Brian: Now, those are just three industries that I was a part of that I learned from. There's a lot of other industries out there that are doing a lot of really cool things and learning best practices.

Brian: But there's one thing that I learned that I didn't really talk about today, and that's kind of a combination of some of the stuff I talked about, thedirect offer strategy. And this is something I'm gonna be talking about on our, it's our first live, like live workshop.

Brian: The plan is September 30th

Brian: to do a live workshop. Should be 1:00 PM next Tuesday. This episode airs on the 23rd. So ifyou're listening to this, the week he came out, it'll be September 30th, which is a Tuesday at 1:00 PM

Brian: But the direct offer strategy is something that kind of combines some of the things we talked about today and helps you again, turn more eyeballs into clients. And that is the key to making your freelance business work is if you have a tiny amount of eyeballs, we have to get more of these people to turn to clients.

Brian: If you have a lot of eyeballs, like that guy I talked [00:42:00] about in episode

Brian: 361, we had 20,000 website visitors a month. It's a ton of eyeballs. This is still important to you because you're essentially capping your income if you have a ton of eyeballs and not many of those are turning into dollars. So the direct offer strategy is a really good way of getting more eyeballs turning into dollars.

Brian: And I'll be talking about it live. September 30th, 1:00 PM Just go to six figure creative.com/live LIVE to register for them. If you haven't already, maybe you've already seen emails about it, there will be no replay for it. This will be live only,

Brian: and if you wanna know why, it's because I have not done a live thing like this, I don't think ever. I've spoken at events, I have talked to our clients, dozens of, dozens of clients on calls every week for like the last four years, maybe longer, especially if you go back into the course world.

Brian: But I've not done one live to just the public for free. I kinda wanna work out kinks before I ever record and distribute this in any way, shape or form. So if you wanna see me flub, but also deliver as high value as I possibly can. Talk about the direct offer strategy, help you turn more eyeballs into dollars than register six figure creative.com/live.

Brian: Hope to see you there. Peace, hope.