The 4 Major Missing Pieces Of Your Marketing Plan | The Client Acquisition Series

[00:00:00] Welcome to the six figure creative podcast. I'm your host Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the podcast. Welcome. Thanks for listening. the goal of the show is to help you earn more from your creative. In hopefully a way that doesn't make you feel like you are selling your soul. Something that doesn't make you feel slimy and icky using methods that you can hopefully wake up and still look at yourself in the mirror and say, I like you for those who already listen to the podcast.

Welcome back. Thanks for uh, coming back to the show again. I've got with me today, my wonderful substitute cohost, recurring guests. I don't know, whatever you wanna call yourself. Mark. You can just label yourself at this point.

I don't even know what I'm called at this point, but,

the prince of the six figure creative podcast.

the beautiful prince of the six figure creative podcast. That's gonna be my uh, my new LinkedIn,

I come with you with unfortunate, sad, like regret some of the other weekend when I was supposed to come visit you. me and Megan were coming into town. You were gonna treat me a brunch, like you were gonna pay for the whole meal.

never said I was gonna pay for the whole meal, but I was gonna treat you there, dude. No, I'm kidding. I would've paid. I

No, I'm just joking. I would've probably paid for you, but unfortunately my, had COVID in

you had, you had COVID

for some background, we got it back in [00:01:00] June, 2020. We were the first people that I knew that got it. Maybe we got it when we were in Southeast Asia in January and just, it finally hit us in June.

That's probably not the case. And then we got the old VAX, the old stab, and then we still got it again. And this was. Two weeks before leaving for Bali. So like, actually it was probably a good thing that we got it. So we don't have to worry about getting it while we're traveling. Right. But, either way I was sad cuz I didn't get to see you on dude.

okay. Well, couple things I've had COVID three times now it just, it can't stay away from me. Uh, got it internationally twice, which that was fun. But those of you guys listening Brian is actually like super picky about brunch.

So I was like really thinking all week, like, where am I gonna take this guy? Where the hell am I gonna take Brian for brunch? He's not gonna like, wherever I

in, you're in Charlotte. We have people in, in our listening to your podcast from Charlotte who have been to Charlotte, where are we gonna.

Well, okay. Real quick. Nashville's known for their brunch. Everybody. I know in Nashville, they're like, eh, you may get brunch.

Everybody here is like, do you wanna grab breakfast, bro? It's like, yeah, I'm down for [00:02:00] breakfast.

my wife literally ran a, brunch themed Instagram account called brunch fill she got like thousands of followers from that, like years ago when we were like absolute brunch feeds, she got tired of it and just kind of abandoned it, but it it was a

there, there, a good brunch scene here, allegedly. I was gonna take you to eighth and sand if you guys uh, and Charlotte listen to this eighth and sand is dope. Very good. I was gonna get you the shock Shah, bro. It was very delicious.

I promised anyone who's new to this podcast. We're not gonna talk about brunch for the rest of this. We actually have a really great topic to talk about today, but you're right. Like when you talked about me being a picky brunch eater, like I was looking at our budget recently and we spend, I think more on food as a couple than we spend on our housing.

I think that was the last I looked

well, last time I visited or no, a couple times ago when I visited you were just so excited about brunch. And I'm just thinking this guy loves brunch and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna go with it. I love Brun. I'm like a simple guy. Give like a solid bagel.

Like a good one. I'll be good with that. But brunch, it's just there's everybody's like Holland [00:03:00] sauce. It's

You know why, you know, why I'm so excited about it's because if I'm not doing brunch, like on a Saturday or Sunday with my wife or some friends, I eat the same exact breakfast every day. And I have for the past decade, it is literally. A single egg I've changed the way I make the egg. It's either scrambled or fried.

Right now it's fried with some GI butter GI butter that I made from scratch myself. By the way, I like making things from scratch and I make oatmeal with peanut butter in it. I put peanut butter, my oatmeal with brown sugar and maple syrup. And it's amazing. And I make the peanut butter myself from scratch with my vitamin mix.

So

can you say oatmeal again?

oatmeal,

I thought you just said oatmeal,

oatmeal. I probably did, man. I'm from Alabama.

dude, so Alabama, bro, I have some oatmeal and a side of G. How about, let's talk about our forepart today about brunch.

Let's transit this into topic. We've already lost any new listeners. So like I'm glad our OG people that listen to this podcast regularly are still sticking around, but all you, new people I've already left. So I don't even have to talk to anymore. Sorry, let's talk about the topic for the show today. And you already saw the title, so you know what this is about, but we're gonna talk [00:04:00] about four major missing pieces of your studio's marketing plan. you're likely missing any sort of marketing plan in your business.

If you're like the typical freelancer I, I talk to, I coach I, I work with, and I just see from the outside looking in so many of our people in our community that have absolutely no marketing plan whatsoever. So we wanna walk you through the four major missing pieces, what you can do to implement those four major missing pieces so that you have some sort of marketing plan in place.

And I think the mistake that most people listening to, if you're in our audience right now, and this is, probably you, is you rely heavily on hope marketing. you think that I'm good enough. So people will come to me or that referrals will be all I ever need as a freelancer, which could be farther from the truth.

We actually have a whole episode on something called the word of mouth death trap. Go back to our podcast backlog to find that. that's not a plan. that is hope marketing. If you were just hoping people are gonna find you and you have no plan in place like that is the definition of hope marketing.

And if you are relying on hope marketing, then you're probably the victim of the fester famine cycle. I feel like everyone's experienced this to some extent and especially myself where, like, I literally remember back in [00:05:00] 2014 or 2015, I had a $20,000 month in January, and then I had a $1,200 month in February.

if that doesn't show you like the FEAS famine cycle, like nothing does.

Yeah, I would think pretty regular that people make a lot of money quick and then they're like, oh, I'm rich. And then they stop working. And then like, no money is coming in the next two months.

you're just winging it. again, you're waiting on people to find you. you have no predictability in place in my past, I've had months where I feel like I'm lost and hopeless, where you have plenty of work coming in your head's down in the work.

You're not worrying about marketing. You're getting clients because things are going great. And then it dries up and you're wondering what happened? And again, this is old Brian unsophisticated, Brian, before he learned what being a business owner actually is. So if you have ever felt this way and you've gotten to this place where you have Feasta famine clients or no clients this is an episode for you. Absolutely. it's one thing to know we've messed up. We all probably know that. I'm hoping that what we say today will help you put this four part marketing plan into place or help put these things that are missing in your business. But just talking logically for a second, mark, I'll [00:06:00] ask you theoretically here, if no one knows you.

Does it really matter how good you are at what you do,

Absolutely not.

sounds stupid when you ask it that way. Like, so pointedly like that, but like, So many people make this mistake. I spend all day getting better at my craft. I am the best person I know at this thing. Why doesn't people hire me? It's because no one knows you exist. this is trap we follow to again and again, and again, it's the reason that the best person for the job rarely is the one that gets hired.

And part of it is because you're being an irresponsible business owner. you have taken responsibilities on once you launch a business, you have responsibilities for the people that you could serve. because if they hire someone that's worse than you, you failed them because they didn't get the best that they possibly could because they didn't know you existed.

you fail on your responsibilities for any family you might have, which I, don't wanna cast stones or sound like. I'm judging people, but like as a business owner, we have responsibilities for business, for personal expenses, for family obligations for so much. And if we ignore this part of our [00:07:00] business, the thing that brings in clients brings in income.

The fuel of our business or the blood, the oxygen of our business, then your life, your business is gonna be more stressful than it needs to be. So hopefully this is convinced you, if you are the person who's relying on hope marketing who has fester, famine business, that this is the time to change. And hopefully what we talk about today is gonna help you put the pieces in place. You need to start getting some consistency. we're gonna walk you through the four part marketing plan doing something to create intentionality in your marketing so that you can start attracting clients.

This is honestly like as freelancers. We don't think about this as like, Hey, we're a business owner, but every business on earth has to figure these things out. They have to have all these pieces in place. If they're ever going to be successful. It I have two software companies.

It's the exact same four parts. I'm There is no difference between a marketing plan for a freelancer music producer versus a photographer versus a videographer versus my two software companies versus my coaching company versus my courses. Like it's all the same.

It's the same four parts. And if you're ready to, [00:08:00] I guess, graduate from someone who just fell into being self-employed someone who is not taking this seriously, you wanna go to an actual business owner becoming a real business. This is how you do it. So let's move into part one part, one of the four missing pieces of your marketing plan. this is what I call the lead generation part of your business. And before you turn this off and think, ah, this is too markety and like I don't wanna talk about lead generation. What is that? Really? This to me is just, how are we creating awareness that we exist on this earth? That's the first part? How do I become known? We have episodes on this in the past. You can go back to the, the, backlog that me and mark have done on the client acquisition series.

but Specifically with lead generation.

This is where people kind of stop. They think like, okay, people know I exist. That's good enough. I can move on with my marketing plan. And to me, like, the overarching message I wanna talk about here for this first part is like build a fucking mailing list. mark, you have a mailing.

Yep. I have, I think at this point it's like 12 or 13,000.

Okay, great. That's a good, substantial, like meaty mailing list.

yours is way more, but

it's in the tens of thousands and

whatever,

yeah. the one for six figure creatives [00:09:00] specifically is much smaller. It's like just under 3000. So it's a little small, but mighty growing list. Cuz six figure creative is a newer brand, but just build a mailing list.

And like the argument I use for. is this If you're listening to this podcast specifically, you are listening probably because you got on my mailings to some point, and you started listening to this podcast and whether or not you open my emails up, you're still listening to this podcast.

People who have purchased my software or joined my coaching program or people who have purchased a course for me in the past, they were on my mailing list. think about this? How many products or services have you bought mark in the last year from an email list that you were.

A lot. , I'd say the majority of them.

yeah, like I, I can tell you, like, especially back when all I did was produce music as a freelancer, like I purchased so many plugins software from email list that I was on. So like mailing list work on you, it works on you mark. It works on me cause I buy stuff from mailing list all the time that I'm a part of, it works for you, the listener, you buy products and services and things you need or don't need.

why on earth do you. Just because it works on you, you don't think [00:10:00] it can work for you as well. Like it makes no sense

Yeah. And like also a mailing list. original reason why people said to use it is because, well, you don't own traffic that you have on Instagram or Facebook or wherever, because what if your account is taken away right. thing

that literally happened to you with Facebook ads.

it was great.

I'm finally back on, let's not talk about it as traumatic experience. No, I'm kidding. but yeah, you like you own contact information. It's your iPhone's contact info, can text this person. It's the same thing, but also um, you buy something from somebody it's no different than kind in a relationship with somebody, if you are married to someone.

You 99% of marriages are not, you meet them on the first day. You know, usually takes a while you get tight with them, then you start dating and meet the parents, but a boom you're married. Well, it's, no different than selling something. And a mailing list is just a very easy way.

to stay top of mind where you can kind of build a relation with someone over [00:11:00] time. And it's, great. It's I massive for my business.

as a freelancer, when you are offering services to people, you don't have to have a mail, like a massive mailing list. You don't need 12,000 people. You don't need 30, 40, 50,000 people on the list. You can have a really good business with hundreds of people, which sounds like a lot still, but it's not,

I know freelancers who have email lists of like 50 or 60 people and it makes them like a hundred grand a year. it's just the right people. You.

Yep. So like that's my advice is this is the missing piece building a mailing list. And there's more that comes to this. Like you can build your mailing list with content marketing. Like this podcast is a form of content marketing you can build with, paid advertising, which if you want a great way to advertise yourself as a business, as a freelancer, as a creative, without coming across as needy advertise a lead magnet, build your mailing list.

It's a way higher value way to promote yourself than saying, Hey, hire me. Hey, hire me. Which is what a lot of freelancers do when they do paid ads and they completely screw it up. So mailing list that is like missing piece. Number one, start there. If you don't have that, this will be a huge missing piece that will, will [00:12:00] help your business in the long run.

part two. The second missing piece of your marketing plan is I guess the short name for this would be lead, nurture. It's nurturing the leads that you.

better way of saying this is like, how do you stay top of mind with people? How do you build trust and credibility with people? How do you go from, I know who you are and don't trust you.

You're kind of creepy. You've got a weird mustache and your hair's shaved on the sides and

all right. Stop it, Brian. Oh my God.

how do you go from that to like, okay, this person's not so bad. This person's like, okay. I like some of the stuff they say too, oh, I trust this person. I'm gonna hire them.

how do we make this transition all across that spectrum? It's something called lead nurture. I'm pretty sure if you just look through our backlog for the term lead nurture, there's something there. don't remember the exact episode. I can't find it in my research just now, but so mark and I have very similar with different kind of approaches to this. I practice something called the 3% rule, mark practices, something called the 80 19 1 rule.

We'll both explain them. They're basically the same thing, but I'll explain mine first. And then mark can kinda give his variation on it, but there's something I call the 3% rule. And that just [00:13:00] states that only 3% of people who are in your world that are aware that you exist only 3% of them. Are ready to buy right now are ready to hire somebody for the service that you offer.

So if you are building a mailing list of people that are interested in the thing that you offer or interested in the lead magnet, that would say, Hey, this person is a good lead for me to work with. Assuming your lead magnet is correct, cuz that's a big, if not everyone does it right.

But if you have a hundred people on the mailing list, only 3% of those people are ready to buy right now. That means the other 97. Are not ready. They don't care. They're not interested. the goal with lead nurture is to keep them top of mind until they're ready to. That 97% has to be nurtured over time until they're ready to buy.

And that 3%, just because they're ready right now does not mean they trust you enough to hire you. So you have to have things into place that builds that trust, that credibility that gets them to know you like you trust you so that when they come into the 3%, they are one of the three.

That they trust you enough to actually hire you. This is what Lee nurture is all about. Now, mark, yours is roughly the same, but I like what you're saying, because it's probably a little more [00:14:00] realistic to the

Yeah. the 3% rule assumes that 97% of people out there are potentially going to buy from you. And it's just a matter of getting them to the 3%. I go into it a lot more cynical. I think 80% of people who meet you will never buy from you. They don't care what you're up to. They have no idea what you're up to and they don't care about your updates.

1% is ready to buy. They're like, wow, this is exactly the right thing for me. This is great. And your entire job is just to talk to that 19% and try to move them to that 1%.

actually, I've heard another version of this. and I might even taught this at some point, similar to this. These are all frameworks, by the way, everyone's market is different.

Everyone's niche is different and every one of you are different people. So these numbers will vary greatly, but this is just a rule of thumb for you to kind of understand so that when you're thinking through, like, I have a mailing list of a thousand people, why don't I have a schedule full of clients right now?

it's because of what we're talking about right now, but 80% of people will never hire you no matter what you. [00:15:00] 1% of people will hire you no matter what, despite your best efforts to fuck things up. And 19% of people are on the fence. better you are at getting that 19% off the fence and under your calendar as a client, the bigger business you build. 19 1 or the 3% rule, no matter what it is, point's the same. Build some sort of lead nurture now content marketing actually fall. It's one of the rare things that fall into part one and two here, lead generation. You can build a mailing list. You can generate leads from content marketing.

If you're good at it. Part two, it's also great at nurturing leads because we put this podcast episode out every single week. It's interviews with amazing people in the creative world. It's solo episodes. Sometimes you'll probably be getting some solo episodes for me while I'm traveling Bali where I'm like 12 hour time zone difference from every other person on earth.

And then sometimes it's me and mark talking through episodes like this, but every single week you're getting some dose of six figure creative and me and. That does a wonderful job of at the very least keeping six figure your creative top of mind until you do something like join my coaching [00:16:00] program until you do something like sign up for easy funnels until you do something like sign up for file pass one of my software companies.

So anything else to add to the lead nurture conversation, mark?

Nope. I think that that summed up it perfectly, dude. kind of go into it, understanding that most people are not ready because lot of people think their only sales are gonna be from new traffic. And that's just not the case.

Like most people are not ready to buy. If think I was watching this video earlier today, and this girl was talking about, you marketing. And she was like, I bought metal straws on Amazon and looked back as when I originally added it to cart. It took me five months to buy this thing for $12 like and she was like, most people act like that. Most people do not see you and buy from, you the first day.

I enrolled a, new cohort of coaching students over the summer in, June, July 20, 22. And I did a deep dive of like debrief of like where all those leads came from, because it's really good to know those, things.

was something like 60% or more of the income from that cohort, or those leads [00:17:00] came from 2019 or earlier. And a lot of those people that joined from 2019 or earlier had never purchased another thing for me. So they had been on my mailing list as long ago, as 2015, that long ago, they have been in my world, been in my mailing list, been nurtured over. And then bought their first thing for me in 2022. So that is why lead nurture is so important. Like it's like their value to my business, not as a person, but just clarifying value to my business.

And six figure creative. The value to the business was $0, 20 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 20, 21, 7 years of zero value. and then 2022, it shut up above most other people in my uh, customer list.

So let's move on to part three sales. This is the third part that's missing in your marketing plan marketing and client acquisition. I kinda are synonymous to me, but sales is absolutely part of client acquisition. think about this whenever you proposed to your wife and I, I can know the answer to this, but did your wife say yes, based on the quality of a proposal, mark

gotta ask her. I, of tricked [00:18:00] her into it. No, I'm kidding. This is an obvious question. just said, yes,

the relationship up to that point is the reason she said yes. And that is like the weirdest funniest secret of sales is if you've done your part on lead generation lead, nurture, building trust and credibility, you've done all the right things up at this point.

The proposal is just a formality. at this point, it's just to signify that you're ready to take the next step. It's just like marriage. So sales probably isn't as important as people make it out to. Which is weird to say, but it's just not because if you've done everything right to this point, the sale's already made.

Now, it's just getting it over the finish line.

honestly just consider sales a transition moment from marketing to fulfillment. but sales are really easy. The thing that most people have an issue with is basically realizing that all making a sale is, is just finally being at the moment where you know, that that person.

Is so convinced that you are going to add so much value. They need you more than you need them, because a [00:19:00] lot of people get on sales and they think they're like a car salesman person. And they're like, ah, you know, I'll, I'll throw in the, the foot mats. You know, it's like, that's not, how sales work, like actual people who are good at sales.

They truly believe in what they do. And they know it's actually gonna help that person. And if that person knows they're going to get help, the sale is just a matter of saying, Hey, where do I put my credit card?

and again, the worst you do at parts one and two lead generation lead nurture, The less you do it, that the more work you have to do to get the sale over the line. But to kind of go back to this, it's fun, equating this to relationships. breaks down when we start talking about money in the sales process and like value and things like that and how much they need you more than you need them a marriage again, should not be that that way.

But when we're, talking about relationships, lead generation, to me is like swiping left or right on tender or Bumble, like Lead nurture is like the actual process of getting another person it's dating them. It's building the relationship going from no to like to trust.

And then sales is closer to, if you're finding a business partner, this is more what it's like, you have to trust them enough already before you even talk about the details of the partnership but let's [00:20:00] talk about sales now. There's two things that I wanna bring up here in the sales process that you might not be doing that is hurting you. The first thing is just getting on the phone with people or in person with people or on zoom with people. It doesn't matter. As long as you're talking in real time, human to. I think that's the first mistake people make is when they go through this process, it's too impersonal. can you imagine, like, if you'd texted Shera, like, Hey Shera, will you marry me? like,

she would've said yes,

she, I mean, maybe same with Meg. Like Megan might have said yes, but she'd have had a real strong talking to me if that was the way I proposed to

it

Yeah. So

that's the first part. Just make it personal, make it feel like you care about the person the next part, which is not as obvious is just making sure you have. You can call it a sales script. You can call it a sales outline. You can call it a sales roadmap.

I don't really care what you call it, but it's something to keep you on topic for the conversation so that you're not going all over the place. if you don't have a sales script or an outline or something, you're following to talk on the phone. It'll take longer than it should. You'll leave out important details that need to be discussed before you move forward.

you'll take on clients. You should never take on because part of sales is making sure you're a good fit for [00:21:00] each other, because they may know a lot about you, especially if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel or some sort of long form content, or you're really a. show up on social media regularly.

They know a lot about you. They like you, they trust you, but this is probably your first interaction with them. You don't know anything about them. So part of a good sales process is weeding out people who are a bad fit and part of the sales script or a sales outline is just making sure, you know, the things you need to ask every single time so that you're not rushing into a relationship that's gonna fall apart and blow up later and be a red flag client. cause we've all had those mark, like we've all learned the hard way of what, like red flag clients that make our lives miserable.

Fired a few last year. actually just fired one last month. It's it's a very fun

you never get rid of 'em all like, I, I still to this day, occasionally get some, because ignore some red flag somewhere, every time, something like that happens, I find how can I never have that happen again? And I put a process into place. I put a question on my onboarding form, or I put a question on my sales outline to go over, so that doesn't happen anymore.

And the third thing is, as far as your sales process is talk money, it's like with business partners, like in business partnerships, you're gonna talk money.

You're gonna [00:22:00] talk percentages. You're gonna have all these sort of bases covered. It's the same with clients. Don't rely on sending a proposal out to clients before any money is discussed.

of another thing too, it's like, you like partnerships or, you married to someone should be like, what's the criteria that compels me to work with this person versus is there a way I can make this work?

You need to be able to know that you can provide value to that person because people ask for refunds, like if you do a poor job, you get divorced, you know, like there's business breakup. So you have to be able to talk about all that stuff and know full on, like, this is the right decision to.

Well said my dude. that's the three part so far we've got lead generation is part one lead nurture is part two. Sales is part three, the fourth missing piece and something that people unfortunately ignore too much to their own detriment It's a business model. That makes sense. That's the easiest way to say this. and the metric I, track here and this is what I use with my coaching clients is what's your average [00:23:00] annual client value because. Well, what hundred percent dictate how much marketing you have to do. some people, they have clients that work with them multiple times in a year.

Sometimes you just work with a client one time and you never see 'em again, doesn't matter what your business model is. You always have an average annual client value and that's the metric to track the higher. This number is. The less, you have to worry about marketing in sales.

The lower, this number is the more of a market. You have to become an example. I love to use all the time because so much of our, audience is still in the audio industry is if you're a mastering engineer, prepare yourself. Your average annual client value is 500 bucks or less. In most cases, you are going to have to be a marketer.

If you want a hundred grand as a master engineer per year, to be a six figure home studio owner, or a six figure mastering engineer, you have to have 200 clients per year at that price. Because your average annual client value is so low, 200 clients a year is a lot that's tough to do, I think for most people.

So that means you have to get 10 new clients every single month without fail. And it's a little easier. The higher that number gets for average annual client value. Another [00:24:00] example I give is if you're doing podcast production, which is some of my most successful coaching students the average client value my coaching students for podcast production is like 15 to 20 grand, a.

When your average client value is 15 grand to 20 grand a year. You only need like three clients to make six figures and it's all recurring income. So depending on your business model, the podcast producer, they don't have to be a marketer. They could go like it's the nineties and go shake hands and be at networking events.

And they don't have to worry about all the mailing list stuff necessarily. They don't have to do content marketing. Although I still encourage it, they can just go meet people, get a few clients, call a day. But if your average annual client value is lower, Usually that's a sign that you're offering a commoditized service as well.

Like mastering is. Commoditized service headshots as a photographer, commoditized service, doing local commercials for local businesses as a videographer wedding photographers, commoditized service. I can go shop that around.

If that's your business model, it can be very difficult to get that average annual client value up. But the higher, this value is the more sound business you have, The more success you're gonna have in everything else you do because [00:25:00] now metrics make sense for doing paid acquisition. just like mark here, maybe for a second, $20,000 per year, average annual client value for podcast producers, you can spend significantly more for paid ads

Yeah, you can spend exactly $19,999 and 99 cents to get one customer and you will be profitable.

what's funny is if your average client stays around for more than two or three years, you actually have a sound business, even spending $20,000 to acquire a client.

here's another thing too. It's like, if you're a freelancer, you should have an honest conversation with yourself about your business model. Is there a way where you can. Repeat clients or your average annual client or customer value. Like if you're a wedding photographer, you're probably not gonna have many repeat clients.

It's.

you

you sort of can cuz you start focusing on getting gatekeepers, like

exactly. So you talk to wedding planners, it's like, that's kind of a better way. If you talk to flower shops, if they can. You give them a cut, you there's ways [00:26:00] where

Well there's

make life a little bit easier.

If you're trying to increase this number on part four of your marketing plan, there's a few ways to do it. One is raise your prices. That's the easiest and most obvious and most overlooked thing. And the thing that freelancers suck at the most is they don't charge enough.

In almost all cases. You raise your prices, call it 50%. You'll lose some potential clients. You would've always gained, but at the end of the year, you make more and you work less worst case scenario, you make the same amount of money and you work less.

It's a win-win. If you raise your prices in most cases, especially as you get busier, the second way is to offer a better, more transformational service. the better, the transformation of what you're offering is the more you can charge, just going back to the podcast producer example, I have so many people that came to me that were just doing podcast editing as a service Leland.

If you're listening right now, our podcast editor, your ears, don't listen to anything I'm saying right now, this is not for you. This is for the rest of the world. if you're editing podcast episodes, it's one of the lowest paying positions because you're a button of seat. If you are. Offering full service podcast production, where you're doing [00:27:00] everything from planning, the episodes, you are helping them produce the content you're helping them engineer it.

You're helping them launch the show. You're helping them with their gear. You're helping them with the show art. You're helping them with show notes. You're helping 'em with all these other things. If you have the skill set to do that, that is a order of magnitude higher of what you can charge versus just podcast editing.

Every single industry has a version of this. There is something you can do to offer a higher tier of service so that you can charge more. it's going from a button seat position to a full transformational offer. the third way is just through upsells or cross sales. Like you just have like, would you like fries with that?

I think it was Alex or mosey said upsells are saying, would you like a bigger burger? Instead of the cheeseburger, would you like the double cheeseburger cross sells are like, would you like fries with that burger? And down sales are like, don't have enough money for that burger.

Would you like to get the junior burger instead? So down sales are another thing that people don't really think about, but that goes beyond the skip of us, I think. But there's a bunch of different, fun ways to do that. This is part of being a business. This is a, it's a fun game. If you get into this.

It's part of [00:28:00] being a creative person, because we're all creative at heart and figuring out how to balance all four of these different areas is the game of business. And the better we get it, balancing these numbers, the better our business becomes, the more efficient it becomes, the easier it is to run.

and I kinda use this analogy when I'm talking to my own students in my coaching program is tell you mark, if I have you drive from New York to LA, it's like how many miles? Like 2,600 miles, something like.

It's a while.

It's too long. If you're driving in there and your car gets one mile per gallon, you have to stop every like 15 to 20 miles for gas.

And that's a really, really inefficient, annoying process. Those are the people that have a really, really inefficient bad marketing machine. They're missing one or more of these four pieces and they're having to stop and get clients. And then they fulfill those clients and then they don't do anything with marketing.

they have a big famine period. Then they have to go scramble. that's the stopping every 15 to 20 miles for gas. Those who have a really, really efficient marketing machine, client acquisition machine. If you wanna use that word, they have the hundred mile per gallon vehicle.

They [00:29:00] have the hybrid vehicle, right. And they can go from LA to New York with one or two gas stops tops, one or two gas stops. So now instead of a full-time marketer or someone who's constantly fester famine, You're in maintenance mode. It's real easy to maintain your business. All you have to do is show up every now and again to do a little bit here and there.

You've built a machine that runs for you and the more efficient your machine is, the less maintenance it takes. The less you have to stop for gas. Would you say that's been your experience, mark?

Yeah. I mean if you're so busy repairing your car and filling it up every couple miles, never gonna get to your destination. I think all of us, like our destination is to. frankly, do what we love for a living, not worry about money, be able to kind of create your own life and not have a boss.

And

you're busy, repairing things all the time and freaking out, like. being a, pretty bad boss to yourself, you the hard work and figure out this stuff. And a lot of people that, able to do [00:30:00] this and live great lives for themselves because they've just put in that work.

Yeah. So I guess to wrap this all up for those people that are missing, at least one of these four pieces, if your marketing machine is the one mile per gallon train wreck that I kind outlined in that analogy a second ago, I just wanna make sure you know, that I have a coaching cohort opening up in the fall where I'm taking on. I don't know the number I'm gonna do yet because I'm, it's too early on. This episode's recorded way before it airs , but it's gonna be somewhere between 10 and 20 new coaching clients I'm taking on where I'm helping you walk through building your client acquisition machine. It's where I'm literally walking you through all four parts of this handholding.

You looking over your work, giving you assignments, due dates, accountability. It's a whole thing. There's a lot to this, and it's more than I can really explain of an episode here, but if you're the type of person that like. Collaboration that likes personalized help that likes accountability or needs accountability.

And, you know, you are missing one or four of all these parts in your client acquisition machine. Then I would really encourage you to [00:31:00] consider applying for this cohort for the fall. And you can find more details about this. If you just go to six figure creative.com/clients, I'll have more info there it'll have more information about the coaching program itself, what all is included in it, how you can apply for it, things like that, but just go to six, figure creative.com/clients and apply for that.

And I would love to see you as part of this coaching cohort. And I my promise to. Is, if you are not a good fit for this coaching program, if your business is not ready for this yet, then I will not accept your application. I only accept people who I genuinely think I can help build their business, which means if you're bad at what you do.

I will not accept you. That's like the first thing I look at the number one rule of successful marketing is be good at what you do first. And then if you're good at what you do, then we can start worrying about these other four parts of your business. So again, go apply, hope to see you in there this fall.

you don't make it around this fall, then I don't know where I'll open it up again. It's probably early 20, 23 or something like that. So any last thoughts here, mark, as we wrap this episode up,

Marketing is a multiplier. It's [00:32:00] not magic. So again, what he said, if you're good at what you do, you have a good offer. You can actually help people. There's no reason why you can't have a great income for yourself. It's just about multiplying what you already do. It's not magic. It's completely access.

if you feel like you are not hired as much as you think you should be based on your skills that you have, like so many people know they're good at what they do. They're just not getting enough clients to stay busy full time. Then, I encourage you go to six figure creative.com/clients. and just check it out, see if it's something that might be a good fit for you. all right. I guess we're wrapped up here. Am my dude,

right, bra.