The 5 Major Pricing Mistakes That Keep You Broke

329. Pricing Mistakes

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[00:00:00] Brian: in the freelance world, which you are in, if you listen to the show, pricing can make or break your business.

[00:00:04] Brian: It is so easy to mess up. You could literally have every other part of your business built to perfection. But if you don't have your pricing strategy, correct, and your rates correct, if you don't get those two things right, you can still be busy all the time and broke, which is a horrible combination. You can end up resenting your work or worse, resenting your clients.

[00:00:21] Brian: Actually, they're both terrible. I don't know which one's worse. And even in some cases have clients resent you, which is also awful.

[00:00:27] Brian: all the things you can work on in your business, nothing has a bigger effect to all things that you do than pricing.

[00:00:33] Brian: You can suck at sales. You'll still get clients. Most freelancers, unfortunately, you suck at sales. It's okay. It's not your full time thing. You suck at sales and you still get clients. It's still done. All day long. People still do it. you can suck at generating new leads and still get clients.

[00:00:46] Brian: Many freelancers are the same. You wait for referrals. You don't actually generate new leads. That's fine. You could still have a business that works that way. Many freelancers do.

[00:00:53] Brian: You can even suck at your craft and still get clients, which is funny to think about this is a total side note, if you suck at what you [00:01:00] do, there's a client who equally sucks. So if you're the best of the best at your skill set, there's a amazing client to match that. If you are the worst of the worst at your skill set, there is a terrible client to match that.

[00:01:10] Brian: But I've just seen in many niches, there is a level of client to match every skill set. So you could still technically suck at your craft and still find clients out there for you.

[00:01:18] Brian: But if you are amazing at sales, amazing at generating new business or new leads or new opportunities, new clients, Amazing at your craft, but you mess up pricing. You'd still have a terrible business that you don't enjoy, you don't want to do every day that you get burnout on, that you're super busy on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:01:34] Brian: So let's get this right. I want to talk about five of the most common pricing mistakes that I see that can lead to some of these issues that I'm talking about today.

[00:01:41] Brian: And I want to talk you through how to avoid those as well. If you get this right,

[00:01:44] Brian: We can make more without changing anything else about our business.

[00:01:47] Brian: You can enjoy your work more and you can have a better relationship with your clients without you resenting your clients or your clients resenting you in some cases.

[00:01:53] Brian: If you're new here, hello, glad to have you here. I am Brian, this is my podcast called Six Figure Creative. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want [00:02:00] to earn more from their services without selling their soul. If that sounds like maybe a thing you want, then this is the right podcast for you.

[00:02:05] Brian: So let's dive right into this. We're gonna talk about the five common mistakes that I see freelancers falling into that I want you to avoid. if you fall into one of these mistakes let's find a way to dig our way out of it, right? The first one, and this is one of the most common ones, and this is many, many people is in the show right now.

[00:02:19] Brian: you're going to feel personally attacked here and that's okay, You get stuck in hourly pricing that goes for like day rates, hourly rates, half days, anything where you are literally directly trading dollars for hours or hours for dollars. the reason we get stuck here is because many freelancers are in this, world where we're just offering bespoke services.

[00:02:36] Brian: Every single project. Is totally unique, totally different. There's no possible way we could go to a flat rate.

[00:02:42] Brian: And so you're forced to forever trade your hours directly for dollars. And I don't know about you, but I didn't get into business to just go have a day job somewhere else where I don't have health insurance or I don't have any real upside where I'm literally capped by how many hours I work in a day.

[00:02:58] Brian: You capture none of the upside if you get more [00:03:00] efficient if you get better at your craft where you can deliver things A higher quality at a faster pace You benefit from none of that the only person who benefits from you becoming better Faster more efficient hiring a team. The only person that benefits from that is your client you capture none of that value

[00:03:14] Brian: So instead of daily pricing or hourly pricing or trading our hours for dollars, I want to talk about two things to do here. The first is productize the services with a flat rate. A productized service is basically where we havecreated this package, a package that fits a specific type of client.

[00:03:28] Brian: It work for everybody. It works for a specific type of client. And then we sell that over and over and over and over again.

[00:03:33] Brian: And because we're delivering a same or similar thing over and over and over again, it's easy to price, it's easy to deliver, it's easier to schedule. So you know how long something should take. And you're no longer having to reinvent the wheel for every single project.

[00:03:45] Brian: A good example of this is if you look at a 10, 000 custom made suit from Savile Roe, which is like a high end, area to get suits in, London, I think. Look at that compared to a 50 suit on Amazon. 10, 000 custom suit.

[00:03:57] Brian: you go in, you get measurements, you [00:04:00] pick your fabrics. They make, some mock ups or some small things. You go back in for another measurement and make some more adjustments.

[00:04:05] Brian: You come back for another measurement and it can take, weeks sometimes to get these suits or even longer. And so every single project that someone at a high end tailor like that is doing is very custom made to that one specific individual

[00:04:17] Brian: compared to a 50 suit on Amazon. It is going to be mass manufactured in a factory, probably in China, and they're just going to make the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again. The same sizes, the same everything is just go through the factory, That's an extreme example, but that shows you the two ends of the spectrum productizing your services is very much a spectrum.

[00:04:37] Brian: People that are too far on the end of the bespoke 10, 000 suit has a lot of issues growing and scaling and even pricing their projects because every project is so unique, so different. It brings up all these challenges because you have no idea what you're going towhat you're going to do on this next project because it's so different from the last 10 projects we did

[00:04:55] Brian: on top of that, most freelancers don't have the skill set to be the 10, 000 bespoke [00:05:00] suit at fancy tailor, right the other side of things is the 50 suit. That's the extreme opposite side of the spectrum for the product. I service and that's where the freelancer is just churning out tons of little dollar projects.

[00:05:10] Brian: That's probably similar to working on fiber. I were to guess

[00:05:13] Brian: on the extreme other end, not only would most freelancers or creatives not enjoy that because that's just very much busy, monotonous work, button seat work. You also likely don't have the skill set of productivity to do that Because on the extreme other side, we have to be very efficient.

[00:05:26] Brian: our productivity is what matters. We have to have a lot of systems, processes to make sure things get done quickly and efficiently and on time because we're at high volume business. And then on the other side, the 10, 000 bespoke suit, we have to be very high skillset, high touch, different caliber of clients.

[00:05:39] Brian: It's completely different. So somewhere between those two extremes is where freelancers need to find their place. And I always caution freelancers to move closer to the side of the product high service, closer to the 50 suit side.

[00:05:51] Brian: And the reason being is the closer you are to that side, where you find the sweet spot on that side of the spectrum,

[00:05:56] Brian: the easier your business gets to run. Again, there is a sweet spot for everyone. [00:06:00] Every product does not have to look exactly the same, where you're doing the exact same thing every time. But a good book to recommend for this there's a book called built the cellby I John Warlow. And he tells the story of he had a, I think it was a design agency and they were trying to do every single project under the sun websites to full branding projects to logos to anything that a client wanted, he was willing to do and it turned his business into something he hated doing. And he tried to sell his business. Turns out he couldn't sell it because no one wants to buy a business like that. And so he specialized. He started offering just logo design, which is a product I service.He put in a lot of good processes in place and we're only doing logos for clients and was able to find good team members who could specialize in creating these different styles of logos for different types of clients and then you scale that up and By the time he got to the point where he could sell it He didn't want to sell it because it was a good business to run surprise

[00:06:47] Brian: so when you move towards the spectrum of the extreme side where you are closer to the 50 are Amazon suit than the 10, 000several row suit. When you're closer to that extreme product high service side,it's easier to accurately price [00:07:00] projects.

[00:07:00] Brian: It's easier to accurately schedule projects.

[00:07:02] Brian: It's typically easier to create something that people actually want because people can conceptualize product package where it's very outcome focused versus just, I am a person who offers 30 services and now client has to do a bunch of brain work on how you can potentially help me. Much easier to sell a product I service than a plethora ofservices that they have to pick and choose what they want.

[00:07:22] Brian: And one other upside of this is you're able to create more income streams because you're not reliant on well clients.one really dark side of having extreme bespoke services is that you typically can take on only so many projects at a time. And anytime you have.

[00:07:35] Brian: Few clients representing a lot of your income. Losing one client hurts a lot. It can be detrimental to your business. And when you have more clients coming in at a lower overall price point, for a product high service, preferably in that three to 5, 000 range, sometimes more, sometimes a little less.

[00:07:52] Brian: You can start to build stability because losing one client doesn't crush you. You have lots of little streams of income coming in.

[00:07:58] Brian: And most importantly, for [00:08:00] productized services, you capture the upside of that service.

[00:08:03] Brian: if you find a way to deliver that 5, 000 package in 50 hours instead of 100 hours, your hourly rate just doubled. Whereas before, if you offer that same service at a flat daily rate or a flat hourly rate, Your hourly service doesn't change at all. You still earn 50 bucks an hour. And this is the power of being able to scale up your income by detaching your time, how much you spend on the project, by how much you charge value of the project and detaching those two things is how I was able to get my freelance income from that day rate got, when I started, I was like a hundred dollars a day early in my career up to like 300 bucks a day was most I charged on a day rate.

[00:08:39] Brian: Where I eventually got to flat rate pricing and was able to start scaling my income to where I was earning 300, 350, 400 an hour on some projects. Because now, when I have flat rate, I can focus on things that save me time. Where I can actually hire help now. I can get people to come on the project and take some of those lower value tasks away.

[00:08:57] Brian: So that I'm only working on the high value tasks that only [00:09:00] I can do. And when I start doing that, my income starts multiplying. And if I were to tell a client, I'm going to charge you 300 bucks an hour for this project, they would slap me in the face. They would say, hell no.

[00:09:09] Brian: And that's again, very specific to my market. Every market's different. Some people you can genuinely charge 300 bucks an hour and they won't slap you in the face, not in my niche.

[00:09:15] Brian: It was an episode where we talked about this on episode 169. just go to six figure creative. com slash one six nine. And the title is earning 10, 000 per month with a productized service and only two hours of work. That was an episode with a guy named Brian Castle.

[00:09:27] Brian: He built an agency, service where he had a team delivering service and he slowly scaled himself out of it, replaced himself completely to where it was literally two hours a month, He eventually sold that agency for good chunk of money now runs a software company because he's realized that The ultimate productized service is software.

[00:09:43] Brian: You can build a software one time that delivers the service over and over again It's called software as a service and he's doing really well in that niche now

[00:09:50] Brian: Again that's six figure creative comm slash 169 for that episode There's still one more thing to talk about related to productized services, because you have the productized service built out, right? It's a lot of work, a lot of things to think about, a [00:10:00] lot of things to consider, but then there's a second element of this to discuss that'll keep this a little shorter, but it's equally as important.

[00:10:06] Brian: And that is, who is the avatar you're selling this to? Who is the perfect match for this? Because you can have a productized service that can serve a lot of different people. But there's usually one specific client or one or two specific clients who your service is just worth way more to those people now I'll give an extreme example here

[00:10:21] Brian: An Example of a product I service which some of the clients I've worked with do this is podcast production So full service podcast production, they will handle all the elements to get a show recorded edited mixed Released posted all the things that come together with a podcast like this It's a very productized, very recurring.

[00:10:36] Brian: So great agency to build or if you're just a freelance or great freelance income stream to build because every client pays you every month. however, when you take that skill set of that, package, that productized service of podcast production and you look at the different clients that could use it, you start to see why some people value this more than others. If you are a podcast production company for, Amateurs, people who are just doing fun podcasts with their friends or talking about sports in their basement for fun.

[00:10:59] Brian: The podcast [00:11:00] itself is likely not that valuable to the people. Therefore, the podcast production services are likely not that valuable to the person. So if those are the types of clients you're working with, you can have great skill set. You can have a great process. You can have great packages. However, it's just not valuable to those people.

[00:11:13] Brian: So you can't charge very much because it's just not valuable to them. On the extreme other side, if you are doing B2B podcast production, business to business, where you are working on businesses, podcasts, and the businesses use the podcast for their own marketing efforts for generating customers or clients.

[00:11:27] Brian: And those customers or clients are worth hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. In some cases, you can see how that podcast production service can be worth way more to those people. Therefore you can charge more. So the prices you can charge are directly related to the value you provide to them.

[00:11:42] Brian: And the value you provide is directly proportional to the value that the person gets from the thing that you're delivering. So in the extreme example of the sports bro in his basement talking fantasy football with his friends to a total of 30 monthly listeners on the podcast, that is not going to be a very valuable service.

[00:11:57] Brian: You're just not creating much value working on that show [00:12:00] compared to the B2B podcast where you are working on a show for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people to listen to. That's a much more valuable service. Same service, by the way, same package, same amount of work, just way more value.

[00:12:11] Brian: So that is the kind of the second piece of this is it's not just about creating this package and saying, I'm going to productize and listen to Brian and all these things. And then you just completely ignore the second part of this and go to clients where this is low value. You've got to get both of these things right.

[00:12:23] Brian: So that is pricing mistake. Number one, they're all not this long, by the way, but that's a big one. getting stuck in hourly pricing, usually because you're in this bespoke world where you're making these 10, 000 custom suits versus something a little closer down the spectrum of the 50 Amazon suit.

[00:12:38] Brian: Not to cheapen what you do. I'm just saying that's an extreme example. Next mistake is usually the counter of this. Why people won't go to flat rate pricing is because They're not adding boundaries to flat rate pricing. So many people I talk to, they refuse to go flat rate or they've been avoiding flat rate pricing because for they just don't know how long things can take or some clients can take forever or a sums can take [00:13:00] less time.

[00:13:00] Brian: So when you hear me say you should go to a flat rate, that does not mean I'm saying go to a flat rate with zero exceptions. That does not mean that every single client pays the exact same amount.

[00:13:09] Brian: even if you're niched, even if you have a productized service, not every project looks the same. There could still be variations amongst that. And those variations are very much the things that we enjoy as, creatives, as freelancers, as we want variety. We don't want this monotonous thing where we're just a butt in a seat, planting things and being uh, I think somebody called it a Mac monkey.

[00:13:26] Brian: We don't want that. We want to feel fulfilled in what we do. That doesn't mean you can't productize your service. just because you productize your service, and have these flat rates does not mean every client pays the same. And that's because some clients are quick. They're easy.

[00:13:38] Brian: They're fun to work with.

[00:13:39] Brian: And in those cases, the point of flat rate is to capture the upside of being done faster. Like I said earlier, but then some clients are just extremely slow. They're demanding their pains in the ass.

[00:13:50] Brian: What happens when the project that was supposed to take 100 hours takes 500 hours? you know, a 5, 000 client taking 500 hours and you're now earning [00:14:00] 10 an hour. Is that what we want? Absolutely not. But there can be cases where that happens. And what do we do in those cases?

[00:14:05] Brian: That's where we have the solution. Very easy. It's called up to language. In our pricing and our packaging and our sales conversations and our client agreements, we put a very well thought out up to language in our flat rate pricing, and it simply goes something like this. I charge a flat X amount of dollars for these things, and that includes up to X, up to Y, up to Z.

[00:14:28] Brian: And every niche is different. Like in my world, when I was doing music mixing, it could be, I charge a flat 600 a song and that includes up to 30 tracks, up to five minutes long per song.

[00:14:39] Brian: Or if I'm producing bands where it's very difficult to know how long it's going to take to produce a band, I might be a flat 1, 000 or a flat 1, 500 per song, and that includes up to three days of recording up to X, Y and Z. We put these limitations in place to keep. Clients from dragging this out. So we capture all the upside on those clients that work quickly, efficiently.

[00:14:58] Brian: They're fun to work withall the downside [00:15:00] of those clients that drag us down. we don't have to take a hit on any of those. We don't have to worry about like, Oh, it'll all even out at the end of the day. No, we don't want that. We are allowing them when they come in unprepared or when they are perfectionists or have OCD, or they just change their mind every 30 seconds because they're indecisive.

[00:15:15] Brian: Those clients get to pay more because that's their personality flaws, not ours.

[00:15:19] Brian: So this is a short and simple one, but if you do go to flat rate pricing and you don't have, up to language in your agreements and you haven't really wellthought this stuff out, you were making a mistake and you can again, ruin your business doing this. So you may not. Andyour very first attempt at this, we create flat rate pricing and you've productized your services.

[00:15:36] Brian: You may not nail this. There can be times where something comes up in the project and the thing drags out because you identified, Oh, I didn't have up to language here. I should have had up to three rounds of revisions, or I should have had up to three episodes a week for the podcast. I should have had up to

[00:15:52] Brian: three meetings for this whatever the thing is, that's getting out of hand. Anywhere, literally anywhere that happens where there's just too much of something happening. That's a [00:16:00] new opportunity for you to improve your language and your pricing, your packaging, your sales process and your client agreements and reminding them throughout onboarding that there are limits in place for every single little thing for those little things like up to X meetings, up to X minutes, up to X revisions, up to X, whatever.

[00:16:16] Brian: Every single time one of these things goes wrong, just suck it up for that one project and fix it. So it never happens again. and that is the cycle of business. We change things. Some things work really well. Some things don't. We learn from those things that don't work. We put things in a place to prevent them from ever happening again.

[00:16:30] Brian: And they just repeat the process. Reminds me of when I was running an AirBnB downtown in Nashville and I had processes in place to keep clients from reaching out to me didn't want to be on the AirBnB app answering questions for guests.

[00:16:42] Brian: I wanted to be living my life. It was very much a passive income type thing for me. I had cleaners to do all the work. All I had to do was answer questions if they came in. And so one of the things I would do is anytime someone asked me a question. I would do whatever I could to prevent that question from ever being asked again.

[00:16:56] Brian: So when they ask, how does the Keurig work? I will put a [00:17:00] laminated thing on the Keurig that has detailed, easy to follow instructions. When someone asked me, how does the air conditioner work? I will have detailed things on the air conditioner laminated right there for them to read at the spot. similar business.

[00:17:11] Brian: When a client on a flat rate project, it's out of hand. Just find a way to keep that from ever happening again.

[00:17:16] Brian: And when you're doing these flat rate projects where you're working on many, many projects a year and not just a few clients with big projects, when you're working on these smaller projects, it gets a lot easier to stomach these clients that are a little bit of a pain you're not with them for months.

[00:17:28] Brian: You're with them for days or weeks, and sometimes very little interaction at all. A lot of it's just remote work, asynchronous stuff, depending on your project. So it's easier to stomach when these things get out of hand. So that's the second mistake is just not adding boundaries or guardrails in place when you have flat rate pricing.

[00:17:42] Brian: The third pricing mistake I see tons of freelancers make, people listening right now, make this mistake you're using price as a differentiator,

[00:17:49] Brian: really quick. This is a blanket statement. What is a differentiator? It is what sets you apart from everyone else around you. I call it cornerstone question as a freelancer that you have to have a good answer for. Why should someone hire you instead of all the other people that they could [00:18:00] hire?

[00:18:00] Brian: The answer to that question is differentiation. If the answer is I have lower rates, then you are making this mistake. And that is a very dangerous mistake to make.

[00:18:07] Brian: So when you look at a site like Fiverr, there are two main differentiators that every Fiverr person has. They have price and they have ratings. if you've ever shopped for a freelancer or a contractor or somebody to do something for you on Fiverr or some other job marketplace site like that, like Upwork or one of the other ones, freelancer.

[00:18:24] Brian: com, I think is one. If you are hiring somebody off of those sites, you are likely making your decision based off of the rating that they have and the pricing that they charge. And then there's a third, which is obviously the quality of work, but in a lot of cases, the quality some of those jobs arehard to discern.

[00:18:39] Brian: Many people look similar or same quality, so literally it comes down to price and ratings.

[00:18:44] Brian: And if it's not obvious, if you just differentiate based on price, it can become a quick race to the bottom. And it's this recipe for you have plenty of projects, plenty of people hiring you because you've had quote competitive rates, but then you're always busy. You're always broke. And that's a terrible combination to have.

[00:18:59] Brian: You do not want to [00:19:00] be busy and broke. If you're broke, you need to have a ton of time on your hands to where you can fix all the things that are causing you to be broke. And if you are busy, you better be making a lot of money because all this work you're doing should be bringing in income to you. But if you were broke and busy, that is a death sentence for freelancers.

[00:19:15] Brian: So instead, find other ways to differentiate yourself, to set yourself apart, to stand out, to get clients to hire you, that are outside of just, price. Reviews are a good example. Reviews are one of those things that you can gather over time they start to add up when you get to 100 or more.

[00:19:31] Brian: Those can be really powerful to getting people to say, Oh, this person's legit. That's just one quick example. We actually have awhole series on this episode 300 all the way up to episode 303 whole series is called How to set yourself apart from the other 500 million freelancers in the world, which apparently that number is accurate I don't know. They're probably not all creative freelancers.

[00:19:50] Brian: I think there's like Probably 50 to 60 million creative freelancers out there, but still the title is nice So there's four parts to this and i'm going to just point out three of them for you episode 301 I talked through [00:20:00] what I call brute force differentiators. These are things like just being better at your skill set working faster Having better or fancier equipment having a bigger network These are all things that are like really hard to do But you can just brute force your way to differentiation if you have the work ethic If you have the desire if you have the drive to do that, you can And in some cases, the bank account episode 302 is you can build more credibility or more trust.

[00:20:20] Brian: So I talked through things like social proof, which I just briefly mentioned today. Talk about results focused case studies, especially for those of you in B to B services or really quantitative type things where you're striving for an ROI for your clients or some sort of metric behind this defined success.

[00:20:34] Brian: Talk through social media content, those sorts of ways to just build trust with people. That's episode 302. if that's the differentiators you want to go to just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash 302. If you haven't figured this out, by the way, every episode number you just go to sixfigurecreative.

[00:20:46] Brian: com slash the episode number you want to go to episode 303 talk through specializing by niche by standing for something. So like a, a mission driven type of differentiation or putting your flag in the sand for something standing for something. And then [00:21:00] the third for that episode on 303 is specializing through creating a unique or more appealing offer.

[00:21:04] Brian: that up so I believe I talked to something on pricing confusion That's where you have something that's so unique. It's hard for people to really price shop you So when you are the only one offering this set of things you can have a lot of powerful differentiation Karma that comes with that.

[00:21:18] Brian: So that is the third pricing mistake I see is just using price as a differentiator and ignoring the other like 15 amazing ways to differentiate as a freelancer So because there's so much with that, there is a four part episode series on that. That leads to mistake number four and that is pricing based off fear of rejection

[00:21:34] Brian: Many of you listening the show right now may have just cringed because you know that your pricing very much is based off of that fear of rejection That's you. This is your mistake.We can get you through this So many cases this comes from because your inquiriesevery month new inquiries coming in are so few and far between you feel like you have to maximize every single one that comes through.

[00:21:50] Brian: You cannot lose any of them. so you just lowball the client on your rates. basically negotiate against yourself because you need the project so bad or you feel like you need it so bad.

[00:21:59] Brian: So you end up working [00:22:00] for next to nothing, you end up resenting, yourself, you end up resenting the client for paying you so little, you end up hating the work that you're doing because you're,so uncompensated for what you're doing, you end up staying busy and never fixing the root cause problems that got you here in the first place.

[00:22:12] Brian: And what's even more insidious about this is you never prove to yourself that you are worth more because you keep charging less, therefore perpetuating This voice in the back of your head that you're just not worth this much. You're not worth X amount of dollars. You couldn't charge 5, 000. I can only charge 2000.

[00:22:27] Brian: So it just starts to perpetuate that thought in your head that you can't charge more. Therefore, you never raise your rates. You never get those rates up to a more fair, a more balanced, a more Goldilocks pricing.

[00:22:37] Brian: So this is where we got to look at the root cause of this. What is the root cause of your fear based pricing? Some of it can be literally like mental health things psychology things like from your childhood, maybe you were never told you were enough, you never felt like you were enough.

[00:22:49] Brian: There's a lot of things that go into that. And that's well beyond the scope of what I can talk about in the show. That's where you need to maybe go to therapy, explore those things, unpack those things, start to heal those things. But more commonly, things that I can help with, [00:23:00] thankfully, are you just don't have enough incoming inquiries.

[00:23:02] Brian: because of simple supply demand dynamics, if the supply of your time is high and the demand for it is very low, that's going to suppress what you can charge clients. Your rates are going to be very low because of that. On the flip side of that, if your demand for your services is very high, and because of that your supply of time is very low, naturally you have to raise rates up.

[00:23:21] Brian: If you are always busy and still undercharging, there may be some of those, deeper, more psychological issues that are holding you back from raising your rates that need to be explored through therapy.

[00:23:31] Brian: But I think that's more of the exception to the rule. I think most people here, if you're pricing based on fear of rejection, it's because you just don't have enough at bats. You don't feel like you're getting enough attempts to pitch your services. Therefore, every single one of these just means the world to you.

[00:23:45] Brian: And therefore, you don't want to lose it.

[00:23:46] Brian: so when you can increase demand, increase the amount of leads or inquiries you're getting each month,

[00:23:50] Brian: when you're booked solid two to three months in advance, you have no choice but to raise rates. You want to be rejected. I remember times in my freelance career where I was booked up or five, even six [00:24:00] months in advance, and I'd be working every day. I'd be working 60, 70 hours a week in probably the thickest time of my career.

[00:24:06] Brian: And. I would have a client cancel on me and I would be elated that a project fell through so I could actually have some time off. So you better believe that when those quote requests come in, those inquiries come in for projects that I can't take on for another six months, I'm going to be pitching very high on the price for those.

[00:24:22] Brian: This is where we talk a little bit about dynamic pricing. it kind of goes along with supply demand when your time is very little demand is very high. You're going to almost always pitch higher rates. And when you supply of time goes up and you have a lot of dates to fill up a lot of projects and a few projects coming in, we can start to bring prices down a little bit.

[00:24:38] Brian: It doesn't mean we are doing fear based pricing. We're not going below what our thresholds are, but we are realistic responding to supply and demand.

[00:24:45] Brian: but what I hate to see and what can inevitably happen when people price based on fear of rejection is that you end up in this zombie land. I had a whole YouTube video about this. I don't know how to link it to it, but it was zombie land pricing.

[00:24:56] Brian: And it's usually from fear based pricing. It's where your rates are so low that you make just [00:25:00] enough to survive and you're in this like land of the living dead where you're probably not very happy. You're definitely not thriving. You are surviving. So you're not, destitute, but you don't see a good way out of it.

[00:25:10] Brian: You're just kind of limping along.

[00:25:12] Brian: and you earn enough just to scrape by and nothing else. I've seen so many freelancers that have this like level 10 skill set earning a level one income because they can't get themselves out of this zombie land.

[00:25:22] Brian: So a whole bunch of series on this. We have the client acquisition series that we just went through recently. We have the whole lead generation series that followed go back to our backlog. Find those. That's a good place to start,

[00:25:31] Brian: but until you increase demand, it is very difficult to get out of this fear based pricing mindset. This leads me to the final mistake that I see for pricing, and this is the pretty much the opposite of a lot of things I've talked about so far, but this is still worth discussing because I see this as well.

[00:25:44] Brian: and that is the mistake of trying to capture every single dollar of value from your clients. So you hear me say, charge more or to raise your rates, to increase the prices as your demand goes up. You hear all these things, and that's great advice.

[00:25:56] Brian: Boy, that can lead to in some circumstances is you charge unjustifiably high [00:26:00] rates, clients say yes, but then they regret it and they resent you for it. And it can come from you trying to seek out as much profit as possible. You hear me talk about raise your rates all the time because that's something that freelancers struggle with.

[00:26:09] Brian: And for whatever reason, you're one of the very few percentage of people who don't struggle with that. You do raise your rates all the time, to the point of actual detriment where you're hurting your business.

[00:26:17] Brian: So what can happen is this can be off put into clients. They can feel like they didn't get the value that they were charged. And then they. Sometimes they can proactively push people away from me. He's just too much for what you get People can just feel they don't want to come back to you because it's just not worth it to them

[00:26:31] Brian: And they might feel like they got gouged there's a restaurant in my neighborhood here burger and grain in nashville. They have a 22 hamburger And a 22 hamburger is one of those things that you're sitting down at a restaurant It's a nice restaurant, you know, you're going to spend a lot of money there And so you can justify in the moment spending 22 on a hamburger in the circumstances, because that's what you want at the time.

[00:26:49] Brian: I want a burger right now, even though it's 22. But compared to a steak that's 50, 60, it seems a little more reasonable. after you eat and you're no longer hungry, you start to realize the mistake that you've made. You regret it [00:27:00] later. So I have Weird feelings about, The type of restaurant that can justify charging that because I'm like, Hey, good for you.

[00:27:06] Brian: You got a 22 hamburger. That means it's probably pretty good on the other side. I don't think a hamburger is worth 22 bucks. It's just something in my heart. This tells me no. So instead going back to freelancing, we need to find ways to actually leave money on the table. everything I've said so far is like completely counterintuitive.

[00:27:20] Brian: But if you're the type of person where you feel like maybe, Brian's right here. I might price gouging or making people feel like they're getting their value. I can find ways to give our clients more value than they're being charged. and this can lead to a lot of goodwill.

[00:27:32] Brian: If you leave money on the table or you charge, 4, 500 instead of 5, 000 whatever seems reasonable. It's still very profitable for you, but it's not to the extremes of what you could charge that delta between what you could charge and what's reasonable.

[00:27:45] Brian: Look at it as your marketing budget. You'll have 500 on the table for this project. The client knows it. You were even smart and you send an invoice that said 5, My favorite client discount, 500 bucks. You pay 45, whatever. There's like a lot of strategies around this clients feel good about that.

[00:27:59] Brian: [00:28:00] They don't want to feel like they're taken advantage of. So in these sort of circumstances where you feel like you might be at the upper extreme and you can find ways to alleviate that for your clients from time to time,

[00:28:07] Brian: it builds up the goodwill of clients that will now spread your word instead of detracting against you saying that don't go to this person is not worth it. They'll say, Oh, Brian's awesome. He did this for me. you should definitely work with him. And this is the other side of this, where charging top dollar because it just takes so long for you to fulfill.

[00:28:22] Brian: I also see this where people have really high unjustifiably high rates simply because they are very inefficient at what they do. They take way too long. They are indecisive. They are OCD. They are perfectionists. They are trying to do too much. And in these cases, the only way to get your rates down to something reasonable without taking a massive hit to your finances is to work faster.

[00:28:43] Brian: So get things done quicker, make better, faster decisions. A lot of it comes down to again,when you productize services, you just naturally become faster at delivering you've seen, 30, permutations of this one exact thing before, you know exactly how to handle it versus when you're doing bespoke projects.

[00:28:57] Brian: And this is the first time you'veever seen this problem or this sort [00:29:00] of thing, and you're having to figure this out from scratch that takes forever, but when you can work faster. You can remove those irrelevant things that aren't actually adding value to the project. You can hire someone to do the cheap labor stuff like I did in my career when I was hiring people to do the grunt work, the file management, session prep, the setup, the basic things that anyone with a checklist can do.

[00:29:19] Brian: And you're charging flat rates. This is where you're able to charge a fair wage for what you do and make massive amounts of profit per hour, disproportionate incomes. Now, most of you not trying to squeeze out every single dollar from every single client, and that's good. Most of you listening, they'reprobably stuck in an hourly pricing land or you're using price as a differentiator or you are pricing based off of fear of rejection.

[00:29:38] Brian: If you know you have these issues and you have no idea how you're going to get out of it and you're like, this stuff makes sense, but I've listened to the podcast episode backlog and I just still can't make myself do it. Or I have so many questions about how this pertains specifically to me, my specific snowflake situation.

[00:29:52] Brian: Let's chat. We can help.

[00:29:53] Brian: My team and I will look at all the areas of your business, all the things that are broken, anything that's missing, anything that could just be improved a little bit, [00:30:00] anything that should just be taken away because it's not helping your business at all.

[00:30:02] Brian: And then we put a plan together about actually fixing those things. We'll pitch it to you and see if you actually want to do that plan. If you do, we'll work together. If you don't, we will part ways as friends. No financial obligation if we part ways. And there's usually a lot of stuff around pricing, packaging that we have to work on.

[00:30:15] Brian: Obviously client acquisition, because that's what we are specialists in.

[00:30:18] Brian: We also work with people on productized services, getting closer to that spectrum where you have a,a package you're selling over and over again that you can do from project to project instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

[00:30:27] Brian: And I guess most importantly for a lot of people is getting enough leads in the door where you can confidently price yourself and then start getting yourself booked solid so we can start getting those rates up gradually over time.

[00:30:37] Brian: And get to that, what I call the Goldilocks pricing zone. That's where you are not so high that your clients resent you and are actively going against you. Not so low that you are screwing yourself where you are working and resenting yourself and your clients and your project. But you're finding that sweet spot right in the middle where the profits and for systems and processes and delegation, you're able to get your disproportionately high hourly income.

[00:30:56] Brian: Thank you. If that sounds interesting to you just go to six figure creative [00:31:00] comm slash coaching fill out the short application and My team will get back to you real quick to see if it's good fit or not If it is we'll chat So that's all I have for you today.

[00:31:07] Brian: That's it for this episode six figure creative podcast until next time. Have an awesome week Stop