Stop Pricing Like A Big Dumb Stupid Idiot

366. Stop Pricing Like A Big Stupid Dumb Idiot

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Brian: [00:00:00] Pricing is one of the few things that can drastically change your business, both in a good and a bad way. The problem is it's almost always a bad way, and that's because we have so much junk running around in our heads about pricing because we use emotion instead of logic.

Brian: So we end up doing really, really dumb things with our pricing

Brian: And we worked for years chronically undercompensated for what we do. And we end up forcing our clients to take advantage of us.

Brian: And notice I say force not let our clients take advantage of us. Usually our clients don't wanna take advantage of us. But when you do stupid things to your pricing. You're essentially forcing your clients to take advantage of you

Brian: So let's talk about the six things that you're doing that prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're pricing your services like a big, dumb, stupid idiot. ' cause we continue this ridiculous series, as stupid as this is.

Brian: Remember this,

Brian: I want you to win. This is tongue in cheek. You're not an actually big, dumb, stupid idiot. We just got junk in our heads. I've pulled these issues from this episode and from the rest of the series, from either things that I've done myself or from what I've seen, some of our hundreds of clients we coach doing themselves.

Brian: Any one [00:01:00] of these things, especially when we're talking about pricing, any one of these things can reduce your income by 10 or $50,000 or more for you, higher earners. So my goal is for you to take an honest look at yourself and answer two questions. Question one, am I doing any of these things?

Brian: And if you are, answer question two, and that is, do I want to keep pricing my services like a big, dumb, stupid idiot, or would I rather be making more money?

Brian: I think we know the answer to that. So if you haven't heard of me. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is a six figure creative podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. I take a ton of influence from a lot of outside industries, from a lot of different industries within the freelance world, and I want to pull the best practices from everyone that I see and bring them to you so that you can learn from others' mistakes, others' failures, and what works in other markets, other industries, because I promise you, there's a lot smarter people out there than you.

Brian: There's a lot smarter people out there than me. Those are people that I learned from, and I want you to learn from them as well.

Brian: Let's talk about mistake number one, big, dumb, stupid thing, number one, and that is offering hourly slash daily pricing. When you offer outcome based work or strategic [00:02:00] work,

Brian: and I've beat this horse to death on this podcast, hourly pricing simply punishes you for speed and efficiency. The more efficient you are, the less you make. Over time, you're gonna naturally get faster at things. Every single piece of software you use, every single skill that you acquire, every single tool that you start using, every single technique that you start utilizing, it follows the four stages of competency.

Brian: stage one is unconscious in competence. That's where you arewasting tons of time, experimenting, testing. You don't really know what you don't know, and you're just kind of fumbling around in the dark. Again, every single software, every single tool, every single skill, everything you do, it starts there.

Brian: Stage two is conscious incompetence. That means you are conscious of how bad you are at something. There's tons of wasted time, but you know you're trying to get better and you are making small strides towards getting better at this. Still tons of wasted time. Stage three is conscious competence. That means you're actually good at something, but it takes conscious effort.

Brian: You have to concentrate over it. You're faster, but you're still inefficient, Eventually you graduate to the fourth stage, and that is unconscious competence. That means basically mastered something. You just do it without thinking you're great at it.

Brian: You don't have to think about it. Just like tying your shoe now when you're like five years old, it was such a struggle. You had [00:03:00] to think about it and cross over this and do that, and now you just tie your damn shoe. You're a master of tying your own shoes.

Brian: Why do I bring this up? It's because every single thing you do in your business, you're going through those four stages and most things in your business, you're in stage three or stage four, and over time, more and more things you become a master at. You have unconscious competence. You can just do it. You can just do it without thinking.

Brian: You can do it better than anyone else, and that means You make decisions faster, you complete things faster, but when you charged with day rates or hourly rates, you make less money.

Brian: On top of all that, when we talk about the thing we around here, we call the easy eights. That's automate, delegate, eliminate and

Brian: mitigate. Those are the four of the easy eights. Don't know why there's only four of them, but You get what I mean?

Brian: When you employ those easy eights in your business and reduce the amount of time it takes to do things, especially delegation, when you hire out help, you are hurting your business and hiring out help is just taking out of your income. So there's like a net negative there. Not only are you becoming more efficient with things and you bring people in so you can spend less time on it, now you're paying those people out of your dime per hour.

Brian: So you're disincentivized to build a team. So that's the financial thing. Really dumb. [00:04:00] Really stupid, big dumb idiots priced this way. Still today. There's a few edge cases that I'll talk about before we move on to the next section. 'cause three of you on the podcast that listen to this, outta the thousands that listen are screaming at me right now.

Brian: I'm gonna keep charging daily prices. Maybe. But on top of all that, it's training your clients to care about the wrong thing. They're caring about hours instead of outcomes.

Brian: And so what this means is this can quickly lead to clients micromanaging how you do things, or complaining about how long it takes you to do something. Remember, you're charging per hour like a big, dumb idiot,

Brian: and clients rarely understand how long it takes to reach your standard. Remember, you built a name for yourself. You got great at doing something, and sometimes. No matter what stage you're at, it takes a lot longer than people understand to get the outcome that they want. for me, it was in the, recording studio I produced bands for a decade.

Brian: If you don't know my background.

Brian: And over the years I built a name for myself and people would fly from other countries and other states to come record with me because I had a certain sound that people wanted, I was in demand. And I worked with a lot of cool bands. The problem is many artists did not understand how much work it was to reach that level of quality.

Brian: So I'd have bands reaching out to me that wanted to [00:05:00] do 10 songs in two days,

Brian: or bands that would complain because it took me so long to edit drums or to record guitars or whatever. Insert things here.

Brian: And they didn't understand that this is simply how long it takes to reach excellence and that if I try to rush this to save you money, because by the way, back then I charged per day. So clients were really stressed when it took this long two and a half days per song to record and produce a song. They were stressed because they saw how much money that was costing them.

Brian: And yes, I, I educated 'em. I said, this is how long it takes to reach that level of excellence. you came to me for this specific sound. This is the process it takes to reach that sound. But many people don't do that. They've bend over backwards to speed things up, cut corners so they can charge their clients less because their clients are so concerned about how much it's gonna cost them because they're focused on hours or days, not outcomes.

Brian: So instead of day rates, instead of hourly rates, just charge flat rates

Brian: set that rate based on the outcome and the value to the client. Now, I know there's a bunch of unknowns for some of you, and there can be things where you don't know how long it's gonna take someone to do something, or if the client can take forever, it's in the clients, hands and the client, may take 10 times longer than this [00:06:00] other client who's way better. Again, this was me in the studio 'cause I had bands come in and they were of different varying levels of musicianship so it could take them. Three times longer to record guitars because they're just a bad guitar player.

Brian: How do you account for that? Well, That's where we come up with up to language. I'm putting the quotes on up to when you give a quote out a flat rate for someone, it's going to include up to something, up to three days of recording time, up to three revisions, up to X, Y, and Z.

Brian: And that alone helps mitigate. those overages where clients come in and they waste a bunch of time because they're unprepared or it's just a slight difference from what you typically do because they want something unique. And so you have no idea how to scope that out.

Brian: And you put those essentially guardrails in place, like you're playing Bumper bowling where they put the little bumper pins up.

Brian: If your service is so complex that you cannot come up with a flat rate

Brian: relatively quickly, then chances are you need to productize your services more. You were offering something way too bespoke and the only exception I have to this, the only exception is if you're in the tens of thousands of dollars range. I have a few clients, they're working in something that's like very bespoke and they're charging, you know, 50, a [00:07:00] hundred grand for that.

Brian: And in that case, they do charge a day rate

Brian: because there's so many unknowns and so many moving parts.

Brian: But that is the rare exception. And even then, for some of these clients that I'm working with, we're shiftingtheir entire model to something more stable because that model has so many ups and downs. One of my clients does big commercials. He's a videographer, He's moving away from that because even though he gets, $1,500 day rate, maybe more, maybe two or 2,500, I don't remember the exact numbers.gets a very high day rate,

Brian: but the projects just come in peaks and valleys, And when you look at this client list, we have essentially a well client scenario where just a handful of clients bring him. So much of his income he's had a liability that if one of those clients starts cutting back on budgets for commercials, he's screwed.

Brian: So we're shifting him to a,an area where each client is worth low 10,000.

Brian: Maybe 10, 15,000. He can work with a lot more clients and it's all recurring revenue.

Brian: So that's the first big dumb, stupid idiot mistake. And that's offering daily or hourly pricing for outcome based work. I.Some of you freelancers offer very strategic work, so I wanted to throw that in, but it's a really small minority,

Brian: Big, dumb, stupid mistake. Number two is [00:08:00] sending three tiers. Just because you saw someone else do it. I already talked about this on episode 363, where I said, if you're giving your clients options, you're losing gigs and here's what to do instead. So I've already beat this to death,

Brian: But that's where I kind of compared it to spa pricing menu where you just have a ton of different options that they can choose from, and you've literally given 'em a PDF,

Brian: but a lot of you have tiered pricing. Have the good, better, best. You said, oh look, bronze, silver, gold, because that's what this $5,000 problem needs is, a menu.

Brian: And you've seen it on SaaS, site software as a service, or you've seen other creatives who you thought, Hey, if it works for them, if I give 'em three options, they're gonna pick the middle option and the middle options, the price that I want them to choose,

Brian: and they're gonna feel like they're in control. And that's pricing psychology, right? And so you put your three services together, you slap prices arbitrarily on there. There's no thought put in between what the three different prices are, other than you basically want them to choose the middle pricing tier. And you know, people won't choose the cheapest. Most likely, they probably won't choose the most expensive, and maybe they will, but that's just gravy if they do.

Brian: But the problem is you don't actually know what problem each tier is solving. And worse, all three tiers are solving the same problems, or worst of all.Two of the three tiers don't even fully solve the problem at all. They just givethe [00:09:00] client a cheaper way to get away with spending less money.

Brian: To try to solve the problem, but it doesn't really solve it. It just partially solves it, or a really expensive, overpriced way of solving the problem. It has a few extra perks that sound cool

Brian: And neither you nor your client actually understand how the scope changes between each tier or how the outcome even changes between each tier. So you're giving the client the reign of how they want the problem solved, which kind of sounds logical unless you listen to the episode I had from a few weeks ago.

Brian: But remember. They are not the experts here. You are the expert. You're just simply making it more complicated for them. they're gonna have more questions about the packages, about the services, about how this works, about why one is different than the other. Which one should they take?

Brian: And all of those questions brings confusion and confused. People don't buy. So what you do instead, same thing I recommended several episodes ago. Simply diagnose and then prescribe. Remember, you're the expert, so when a client comes to you and they want your services. You talk to them, you ask a series of questions.

Brian: It's called a discovery call. You figure out what they need. You figure out where they are. Now that's point A where they want to be. That's point B. What's the gap between point A and point B? How does your service bridge that gap? If there's certain things you need to build on that bridge [00:10:00] in order to make it a full, viable, safe bridge for them to cross, so they're guaranteed to get the other side.

Brian: You add that if there's certain things that you don't need to add because it's not really going to help the service, and it's just gonna add bloat to the service and make it more complicated and harder to do, you take those things away And then you prescribe.

Brian: You say, Hey, Mr. Client or Mrs. Client, here's what I think we should be doing. Here's why I think you should be doing this. This is how much it would cost. Would you like to pay or not? Is that cash or card?

Brian: Notice how different that is than giving your client a good, better, best. a bronze, silver, gold kind of pricing tier list.

Brian: The reason software as a service does good, better, best is because they have data scientists. They have teams dedicated to this. They know what they're doing. They're pricing with logic, not emotion, and they're infinitely scalable because it's software I.

Brian: And then when you get to the B2B SaaS world, they offer services on top of the software itself. And when they do that, you get on a call, they figure out what the client needs, and then they prescribe the services they need on top of the software to get to the outcome that they want.

Brian: They do exactly what I'm saying here.

Brian: So you can't just blindly look to other industries and pull them into your world without understanding what's [00:11:00] happening, why they're doing it this way.

Brian: So that's mistake number two is that's again, sending three tiered pricing, trying to be too much like a SaaS company without actually putting thought behind it.

Brian: Big, dumb, stupid mistake. Number three is discounting your pricing before the client even flinches.

Brian: this is a self-sabotage classic you say, Hello, Mr. And Mrs. Client. The press would be $5,000, but I can do it for $4,000 if that helps. you just talked 'em down without even trying. This is what I mean when I say negotiate against yourself.

Brian: There was no one negotiating with me. No one's even pushing back. You simply gave a price and before a word came out of their mouth, you instantly took a thousand dollars off the price point. You've essentially told 'em your rate is made up. It screams that you have low confidence about yourself, about your services,

Brian: and it's a really, really stupid thing. I've seen people do this

Brian: and truth be told, I've likely done it myself. I can't remember specific situations, but the scenario is this, usually, this is the scenario is when you're talking to a client you really wanna work withand then you give your price out and you instantly take a discount off because you really wanna work with them.

Brian: that's the situation where you do this And the irony is, the best fit clients, the ones you wanna work with the most, are generally the ones that will be most willing to pay your full rate.

Brian: So instead, [00:12:00] simple thing here, say your price and shut the fuck up. This is where I make my editor work for his, for his pay.Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Say your price and shut the fuck up.

Brian: Now, seriously, I had a client last week. Tell me that he sat there for a full 60 seconds in silence after dropping his price. That sounds ridiculous. 60 full seconds. He counted it because we make it a point to our clients. So when you say the price, you shut the fuck up and let, them process it because at that point the client is processing

Brian: Anything you say here will largely be forgotten or worse. You will cave to the awkward silence and start negotiating against yourself lowering your price.

Brian: what a lot of people do is If you start going on that three minute monologue, after you drop your price, instead of waiting for an answer, waiting for silent, justbe quiet. Let the client process, instead of that, you go on for three minutes, five minutes straight attempting to justify your rates and your price, and they're not even listening.

Brian: This is more of a sales mistake. It's not really a pricing mistake,

Brian: but just say the price and shut the fuck up. You don't actually have to wait for 60 seconds. By the way, in the case of this client, after 60 seconds. He eventually said, do you have any questions or What are you thinking? Or what's on [00:13:00] your mind?

Brian: You can say that after 30 seconds, but generally 15, 20, 30 seconds in, just be okay with the silence. 'cause generally the, client's just processing, thinking through, they gotta move money around. They gotta hit up somebody for some extra cash. They gotta follow up with the client. They need to get that invoice closed out, Liquidate some investments, sell some gear, whatever it might be.

Brian: So when you drop your price, if the client cannot afford you, I have two pieces of advice for you, especially if they have tried to negotiate with you. The first is no, is a complete answer. It's a complete sentence. It's okay.

Brian: If it's not a good fit, it's not a good fit, you should be rejected by at least 40% of your clients. Everyone you talk to, 40% of the people you talk to, at least you should be rejected by a close rate. Above 60% means that you need to increase rates. 50% is kind of the sweet spot,

Brian: second. If they can't afford you offer a package that they can't afford. If it's possible, and I know it's not always possible, and it kind of goes against some of the things I said before, but there are use cases where it is possible. my background in music production, it was the case. So how I did it was a client would come to me, we'd have a conversation, they'd want 10 songs.

Brian: It'd be, call it 10 grand, 15 grand. They can't afford it. They have five grand. How could I possibly [00:14:00] make that work? It's like half or a third of the budget that it should be. It's simply telling them what they can't afford for their budget. So in my case, $5,000. Maybe we can do an EP instead. You can't do a full length album.

Brian: We can do an EP if for whatever reason it's not possible. There is no way to give them the outcome that they want at the price point that they have in their heads. Then C number one, no is a complete sentence. It is okay. Nos are fine. As a matter of fact, you should be losing projects. If you're not losing projects, it's because you're underpriced.

Brian: If you're closing 80, 90% of the people you talk to, you're not charging enough, and I'll second that on top of, you're likely not generating any new leads. When you are just waiting for referrals, you will close those 80, 90% when your rates are too low. Good referrals with the right rates. Closer to 60, 70%.

Brian: But when you start generating leads, people who don't know like, and trust you as much,that will convert at a much lower rate.

Brian: So that's big, dumb stupid mistake number three. And that's discounting your services before the clients even flinch.

Brian: Big, dumb, stupid mistake number four, and that is pricing for what you would personally pay what you think is fair instead of what the client values to the outcome.

Brian: I've heard this many, many times where a client looks at [00:15:00] a price point that we're consulting them to raise the rates at this level, and the client themselves says, I wouldn't pay that much. My response is always the same. You are not your client. Maybe you wouldn't pay $10,000 for a new website because you don't have a seven figure business that makes an extra a hundred thousand dollars a year from that website you're about to build.

Brian: But they do. You might make 50, a hundred grand a year from your business. Your website might affect 2030 grand of that maybe. But a seven figure client, they're probably making multiple six figures a year off of the work you just did. So they're willing to pay it. You're not your client.

Brian: I heard a phrase that stuck with me. I think it applies here. People sell like they buy. So if you're money conscious, you're cheap. You don't invest in yourself, you don't invest in your business. You end up selling like that. you sell, like you expect people to be cheap, to be money conscious, to not invest in their businesses.

Brian: And that's one thing that over the years I've really noticed about myself is I am not cheap. I will invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in my business. invest hundreds of thousands dollars into myself, into my own education, and I never went to college. Some people they spend hundred thousand plus on a college degree, and that's the last dollars they ever spend on self investment.

Brian: And they try the day [00:16:00] job thing and they hate it. So they get into freelance ' cause I like the freedom. They wanna work from home again, et cetera, et cetera. And when they start pricing out their services, they drastically undercharge because they're doing this exact thing. their pricing and saying their rates based on what they would pay for the service versus what the client would pay for the service, some of them are working with like.almost enterprise level sales. They just have, in a few rare cases you're coming from maybe an agency world or some sort of background. We have a lot of connections and you're working with high caliber people and you are drastically enterprising your services based on what their budgets are and how they buy.

Brian: because you don't understand them, because you yourself are cheap. So instead, price your services based on what it's worth to them, not what feels reasonable to you.

Brian: If anything, your prices should feel unreasonable to you, especially if you're in the B2B space. then on top of all that, kind of in the same bucket is work on your money junk. It's hurting you way more than you think it's hurting you on your sales because. You're cheap. You don't invest in yourself. You don't invest in your business, but it's also hurting your business itself because you're not investing in yourself.

Brian: You're not helping your business. You're not investing in your business at all. And the way this plays out, as I've grown my business and built my business [00:17:00] and I'm trying to attract talent to my business, many people try to think, what's the lowest I can pay someone for this role? My brain is how much do I need to pay to attract the right person for this role?

Brian: It's a big difference in what you will pay. It's a big difference to how you approach things as well.

Brian: When Alex Moey tells me it's $50,000 to spend a day with him, I say, hell yes. Is that all? It's actually like more than double that now, I think. But at the time that I did it, it was like 50 Didn't even hesitate.

Brian: So that is big, dumb, stupid mistake number four, and that is pricing based on what you think is reasonable or what you would personally pay versus the value your service has to the client.

Brian: Big dumb ship of mistake Number five is saying things like, my prices are flexible. Like it's a good thing.

Brian: Now, this sounds like an earlier mistake that I talked about, but this is just different phenomenon altogether. think about this you, Talk to a client you really wanna work with. They ask your rates. You say something like, my rates are flexible. And you're saying that because you, think it makes you sound easy to work with, but it actually makes you sound like someone who has no conviction.

Brian: You have no boundaries. You just get whatever they wanna give you.

Brian: Now think about this. You don't walk into a dentist's office or a doctor's office or some other professional service and say, [00:18:00] Hey. I need a root canal. But are your prices flexible? Hi, I need a checkup. Are your prices flexible? Obviously, no. You obviously are not gonna ask your doctor or your dentist if their prices are flexible.

Brian: Why would your clients ever expect the same from you?

Brian: When you're talking to a client you really wanna work with, sell the call, not your services, not your rates. Don't talk about how flexible your rates are, how easy you're to work with because your rates are adjustable based on the client's needs. None of that stuff. Just set your rates, back 'em up with confidence, clarity, and really avoid talking rates without context.

Brian: Because any sort of time you drop a number without context, it is just a number. There is no context behind it, meaning the client has no way of knowing the value they get for that number. It's one of the reasons almost all of our clients have their rates off of their website. They're not on their website.

Brian: It's because you need context to come up with proper rates.

Brian: So instead of even leading with numbers, leading with flexibility, just lead with you look like a perfect fit client. I would love to work with you. If,let's jump on a call. Let's talk through everything, see if it's even a good fit. I think there's a few things we can dig up and see in this conversation to know not [00:19:00] only if we're a good fit, but how we can help.

Brian: but it's impossible for me to even give you a rate without getting on a call.

Brian: So let's big, dumb, stupid mistake number five. And that is saying my prices are flexible. Like it's a good thing, like you're just such an easy person to work with,

Brian: but all you're doing is saying, hi, I hate money. I'd love to work with you. I hate money. You can take advantage of me if you want. you wanna work together?

Brian: Alright, number six, and that is the last one here. And that is being terrified of raising your prices and then doing it secretly like it's a crime. So think about this. You finally raise your rates. Good job for you, proud of you, but then you only do it for new clients, and that's okay.

Brian: You can kind of keep your old clients grandfathered in. That's the way you think about it at least. And then even then, you just whisper it like it's a dirty secret. You don't want anyone else in the world to know about.

Brian: But again, you tell yourself you're being reasonable, but think about this. Your work is better, your process is tighter, your results are more consistent. Your portfolio, your case studies are expanding. They're improving.

Brian: Everything's on the up except your rates. And when you finally do up your rates, you'll only do it for new clients, and you do it quietly and secretly and you're, almost ashamed of it.

Brian: If you've improved, your pricing should almost always reflect that. instead, I recommend this, be loud, be [00:20:00] proud, be direct about it, and use it as an opportunity to clear out your sales pipeline.

Brian: And here's what I mean. All the people you've been talking to for the last few weeks, the last few months, even the last year. The clients haven't been working with you forever, but are due for coming back into your studio or get a new design or new website or whatever it is that you do.

Brian: Those people, you clear them out, meaning they will convert into clients if you say publicly. Proudly. I am raising my rates on July 15th of this year.

Brian: I've put a lot of time, effort, energy, money. Sacrifice into making my stuff better in this way, that way, this way, I'veinvested into gear, I've invested into education. I paid Alex for Mosey $50,000 to stare at my face and tell me all the things that are wrong with my business, and so therefore, I'm planning a flag in the ground and saying, my rates are going up July 15th.

Brian: If you want to get in those rates go up, I suggest you reach out to me for a quote or a discovery call whatever it's your process is before that date. I.And here's what that does. Everyone who was on the fence, everyone who was looking at working with you, everyone who's just like, I would like to get this done.

Brian: You're kind of the guy or the girl that I wanted to work with. They'll come outta the [00:21:00] woodwork and they will hire you and you'll have the best month of your entire life just because you raised your rates. And then when they come back to you, six months, 12 months, 18 months from now, they will know the rates have gone up.

Brian: On top of that, when your clients come to you after that date and they. Your old rate, you can just refer back to all the promotion you did around raising your rates and this is the new rate and they can respect that.

Brian: but a price increase campaign that you're promoting to, if you have an email list to your social media accounts, is one of the easiest, quickest ways to make a buck.

Brian: But most of you hide behind your rate increases. You're ashamed of it, you're not proud of it, you're not loud about it, and you're not only missing out on the money you could get by just confidently raising your rates. You're also missing out on all the money you would get if you just cleared out your pipeline and announced to them that by this date, I am increasing rates.

Brian: And by the way, you don't have to say how much that pricing increase is, and I don't even recommend you do, I just say you're increasing prices. If you wanna give any number, give a percentage. I'm increasing myrates by 20%, by 25%, buy 50%.And that way you have flexibility to test pricing.

Brian: I always like testing pricing. That's one of my things. I'll add it as like a, dumb stupid mistake. Number seven here, a little bonus one. And that is you never test [00:22:00] your prices or your rates. One of the best things about not having your rates online is that you can actually test your rates. You can have some flexibility around, what if I just charged this and I see what my conversion rate is for the next three, six months?

Brian: And you find that although your sales conversions decreased by 15%, rates went up by 30%. And so it's a net positive. You're working less, you're making more. That's your new norm. And then you start testing, what if I did another 15%? What if I did another 20%? What would that do to my, close rates?

Brian: We talked about this on episode

Brian: 361. title of that episode is he had 20,000 website visitors and a Broken sales process. In that episode, I talk about sales efficiency, really. Nerdy thing to talk about, but on that episode, it was essentially he had 20,000 website visitors coming to his site per month.

Brian: And he was earning something like 25 cents per website visitor, something like that. 25, 30 cents. even maybe 50 cents per website. Visitors what he was earning as a freelancer. And then to counter that, my studio at its peak.

Brian: Was earning 20 to $30 per website visitor. This business earns, I don't know, I shared it in that episode. I don't have the math in front of me right now, but something north of that amount, and that's because we just have a way more [00:23:00] efficient sales process.

Brian: But when you test your rates, you want to tie it to a specific number, and that number for rate tests is when you get on a call with somebody and you're testing your your rates, what's your earnings per call? So if you did 10 calls, you closed five clients at $5,000 each. That's $25,000 earned over the 10 calls.

Brian: That is 2,500 a call Yeah. And so when you start adjusting your rates and you say, okay, I'm gonna go up to 6,000. I'll do 10 more calls and let's see how much I collect there. But your conversion rate drops to 40%. You only close four. You did 6,000. What's my total? It's $24,000. That means I can earn 2,400 to call. It's less efficient.

Brian: I earn 2,500 to call. Now I'm getting 2,400 a call. So if you start doing tests, that's the way to do it Track how much you earn per call on average, which is again, how many discovery calls did you do over the period of time that you're testing, and how much money did you collect, or how money did you earn during that time?

Brian: These are just one of the many things that we work with our clients on, an ongoing basis. The first thing we do is we create an entire continuous client marketing roadmap. It's essentially your roadmap, your marketing plan for how we're gonna get you to where you want to go. We pitch it [00:24:00] to you. If you like it, we coach you.

Brian: If not we part ways, you route no dollars. Then we implement that plan and we build your whole marketing plan out. But then we have ongoing issues we help people with that are struggling or actually not even struggling. some people are trying to go from a hundred to 200, $250,000 or more per year.

Brian: Some of our clients are even multimillion dollar agencies trying to get to their multi multimillion dollar, income level. regardless.

Brian: We have this continuous loop we put people through where we're trying to identify what the biggest bottleneck in their business is. We put tests in place to figure out how can we fix that problem, and then we track and measure the results and we see, did that help or did that hurt? Kinda like I just did with the exercise there on tracking earnings per call.

Brian: If we're doing pricing tests, we track earnings per call. If you've never done these sorts of things, especially if you're a higher earner. It is such a good way of making more money in your business, is having some sort of test in place that you're going to implement. You're going to track the results on, you're gonna report back to yourself or someone else who can consult you, and we can see are these better or are these worse?

Brian: And if they're better, how can we make them even better? Or is there another bottleneck in your business that we can focus on? Now, if this is something that sounds interesting to you, whether you are interested [00:25:00] in getting your client acquisition system built out, scoped out, pitched to you, implemented, we coach you through building it, or you want more of the ongoing, we need to test things, refine things over time, make 'em better, make my business run better, make more money over time.

Brian: Either way, you can go to six figure creative.com/coaching. Learn more about our coaching program. You can apply there and if it's a good fit, we'll chat. If it's not a good fit, we'll let you know. But that's all I got for today. Thanks so much for listening to the six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: See you next week. Peace.