The Freelancer’s Survival Guide | 25 Tips for Payments, Productivity, and Profit

340. Freelancer survival guide - 25 tips

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Brian: [00:00:00] Whether you've been freelancing for like a week or a year or a decade, I bet there are tons and tons and tons of big and small things that you don't know right now because you don't know what you don't know that you knew them, could save you time, could save you money, could save you pain, headache, heartache, it could make you more money, And so there's a lot of little things that can make your life a little better. And I got this episode today from my wife.

Brian: for those who don't know, my wife is if you want to put it the cringiest way possible, a tick tock influencer. If you want to put it the least cringy way possible, she is a. Book influencer in the TikTok space where she talks about cozy books and cozy life and cozy things. So go look her up.

Brian: Meg's Tea Room. So her business model is she creates content for hundreds of thousands of followers and people pay for her to promote their products or books or services or whatever. So she ends up working with a lot of different businesses, creating posts for them and getting paid for those posts.

Brian: I was baking a couple loaves of sourdough this week. and so she casually brought up a complaint. That she hated about her business and something she had to do all the time in it.

Brian: And I was like, honey, you don't have to do that anymore. You can do it one time. And thus this podcast was born. I'll tell you what that thing was as tip number one today in the 25 tips [00:01:00] episode today for your freelance survival guide. If you've never listened to this podcast before, this podcast is called Six Figure Creative.

Brian: Hi, I'm podcast host. I have built a multi six figure freelance business ran for over a decade. I have built other six figure income streams, I think five or six or seven now at this point, a seven figure income stream. And so I'm just a serial entrepreneur. This podcast I created for creative freelancers who want to make more money from their creative skills without selling their soul.

Brian: If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. So let's get to tip number one today. I've got 25 down. Maybe there's some bonuses in here, but it's called around 25. And this comes from my wife's complaint. She was complaining that she hated having to send W 9s to all of the companies she works with.

Brian: If you're in America and you don't already know when a company hires you and they pay you more than I think 600 in a calendar year, you have to send them a W 9 so that they can send you a 1099. A lot of numbers, a lot of tax things. If you know, you know, it doesn't really matter, but here's what does matter.

Brian: You do not have to create a brand new W 9 every single time you send one off to a company. My wife was filling out a brand new one every single time. So filling out all her information, all her address stuff, her social [00:02:00] security number, her signing things, dating things scanning it, uploading it every single time.

Brian: And I didn't know that until she complained about it. And I was like, honey, You just have to create one W 9 for the tax year of 2024. end of the year now, so this is not super helpful, but it'll be really helpful for you next year in 2025. You create one W 9 for the entire year, and you just save it.

Brian: Call it Brian Hood W 9 2025 underscore sign, because you can have a signed or an unsigned version. And save it on your hard drive, and you can always find it. And anytime someone asks for a W 9 from you, you just resend that same one over and over and over again. That is tip number one. Small things that make your life a little bit better.

Brian: that brings us to tip number two today. And that is, if you are a sole proprietor, which is most freelancers I think listen to the show are sole proprietors. Some of you have gone the LLC route, which I recommend in circumstances. This is not a tax episode by the way, just the first two are about taxes.

Brian: If you're a sole proprietor, that means when you fill out your tax forms, your W 9s or any other tax forms, you have to put your personal social security number on that tax form. Did you know that you can actually apply for an EIN, an employer identification number?

Brian: That is a number [00:03:00] that government can assign to your business, even if you're a sole proprietor, you can use in all your tax documents for your business. And that way, when you fill out tax documents, you're not having to put your personal social security number. It's a little bit better for identity security.

Brian: Tip number three, this gets us out of the tax world and into the payment worlds. that is a tip that I love. And that is add late fees to your contracts. Which sounds really mean, right? Someone's gonna pay you money, you put in the contract, if you're late, then it's gonna be X amount per month or per day or whatever on top of the fee.

Brian: Or it might be just a flat late fee if your payment is, late.

Brian: Here's the fun part. You don't actually have to enforce this late fee. This late fee there is just so that they know that if they pay late, there's a consequence to it. And what you'll find is just having the late fee, even if you never enforce it, just having the late fee will get your clients to pay things on time, which is always a good thing.

Brian: No one likes sitting around waiting for a payment to come in that you thought was coming in this month. And you have bills to pay and then it doesn't come in. No one likes that. So if you put a late fee in your contract, you explain it to your clients. Hey, we have a 10 percent late fee. If you miss our, due dates on our, invoices guarantee, you'll get more on time [00:04:00] payments

Brian: This is kind of a bonus tip aside from that, but this is still tip number three. Better yet. Just get paid in advance for everything. That way you never have to become a debt collector. You never have to worry about late fees in all my current businesses and everything I've ever done before as far as I can remember everything I've done I got paid in advance for so when I was doing music production I got paid in advance for all the music I got a 40 percent non refundable deposit to even put the dates on my calendar and on the first scheduled day of recording or the first canceled day of mixing I got the remaining balance that way I was always paid for work before I did the work and I never had to worry about chasing down funds there was only exceptions when I was working with record labels but even with record labels I got a 50% deposit up front because that's just a standard thing to do in the industry.

Brian: So you can still get deposits at least half the payment up front before you do the work. So you can at least get something.

Brian: Tip number four, staying in the payments world is just another way you can position the late fee. This is for those of you who just hate the idea of having a late fee on your invoices or in your client agreements. Instead of a late fee, you can position it as a discount for an early payment, it an early payment incentive.

Brian: And that is where when they pay in advance or they pay upfront or they pay before the due date or before a certain [00:05:00] date or especially pay before the project even started. They get what really is your normal price and is positioned as a early payment discount or early payment incentive.

Brian: And then if it's a late payment, meaning it's paid after a certain date or at the end of the project, that's the higher fee and that's positioned as the normal price. This also works really good for sales too, and I'll tell you why, So for example,

Brian: having a wonderful sales conversation with a client, we talk through the whole discovery call. We get to the pricing conversation. They ask what my rates are, what the price would be for this specific project.

Brian: And I say, 2, 500. The price of this would be 2, 500. Also, I have an early payment incentive that if you pay in advance or you pay before the project starts, you pay before X date whatever you want to put in your terminology, it's actually 2, 000. And 2, 000, by the way, is what you've always charged.

Brian: You're just positioning it as a discount for paying in advance. And the 500 afterwards is the late fee positioned as the normal price. So again, whether it's a late fee or it's an early payment incentive. Pick which resonates with you best and do one of those two and you'll start getting payments in advance so that you don't have to worry about getting paid.

Brian: Cashflow is a killer for freelancers where you're waiting [00:06:00] around for payments. You have all these outstanding invoices that are, supposed to come in and you have planned your budget accordingly so that you know bills are coming up and you know those invoices are coming in, but those bills won't go away, but those invoices can keep delaying.

Brian: The more of those you bring and pay up in advance, the better your cashflow position is a freelancer.

Brian: That was just a tip number five, staying in the payments theme because there's so many payment tips and things that like people just don't do these best practices. I already mentioned this before, haphazardly, but ask for a 50 percent deposit up front. It's standard in many, many industries.

Brian: Most people will pay that up front and it protects you from non payment. Bonus is if you can actually make it non refundable that people don't flake out. That's a lot harder to implement if you're in high demand as a freelancer, especially if you're in the B2C world where your time and energy is in scarce supply, but your demand for your services is in abundance.

Brian: So in those cases, in order to take up a slot in your calendar, you're saying no to other projects. Therefore, there is an opportunity cost to them taking up a slot in your calendar. Therefore, there's a really good reason to have a non refundable deposit for those things. That's what I [00:07:00] did for my entire career as a music producer.

Brian: So tip number five is ask for a 50 percent deposit. I did 40%. Non refundable.if it's not non refundable, meaning you do offer refunds on the deposits, at least make it 50 percent then. Tip number six, if you have to be a debt collector, meaning you have to send out invoices and hope they pay, and if they don't pay on time, then you have to go chase them down.

Brian: At the very least, finding an invoicing tool that will automatically bug your clients to pay. Over and Over and over again until the invoice is paid. So you don't have to be the bad guy. Yes. You'll reach out human to human occasionally after four or five or six automated emails from the invoicing tool, but the invoicing tool will keep that payment top of mind.

Brian: So they never forget. A lot of times people just forget to pay and they're not being malicious. They're not being mean. They're just, it's not top of mind for them, especially if you're in the B2B space and they've got a lot of things going on. And that automated reminder is just that ping. Oh yeah, I got to pay that invoice.

Brian: Tip number seven, automation. Automate your most common followups to clear up brain space. There's somebody who's just basic followups that you have to do for things that you can build basic automations for. [00:08:00] If you have a really good email marketing platform,

Brian: so that like when someone books a discovery call with you, the reminders to show up for the call, what time it is, it's 24 hour reminder, the night before reminder, the morning of reminder, the afternoon reminder. If you're. Serious about making sure people show up for calls, which is very common if you're doing paid ads, less common in really warm spaces where you're just getting referrals, but still those sorts of things day before the very least reminder and an hour before reminders, like the very least you should be doing for your pre call reminders.

Brian: Those can all be automated through good systems. If you have a good platform to do that on, follow up reminders on gathering files from clients, certain platforms allow automated reminders for those that can detect whether the files have been uploaded or not. Okay. Obviously reminders for payments can be automated reminders for long term follow ups where when you finish a project and you want that six month, eight month, 12 month follow up with the client where you're touching them twice a year, just to kind of stay top of mind, those can be automated to some extent.

Brian: If you do those manually though, they're more effective, but just the most basic automation. Canon should be done so that you can free up brain space to do other things in your business as a solopreneur Which you are almost everyone listen this podcast with a few [00:09:00] exceptions of like agencies with like partners Almost all of your solopreneurs meaning you are by yourself in your business So you cannot be responsible for remembering everything in your business Every little thing you can't remember that

Brian: you will drop the ball a lot. If you don't automate things like this to clear up brain space so that you can focus on the bigger, better, more important things in your business, because again, faults have to be done, but they can be automated.

Brian: Freelance survivor guide tip. Number eight, use a dedicated bank account and card for all business expenses. Do not intermingle your personal expenses with your business expenses. My God, if you're doing that, stop. Even if you have a personal bank account with a business credit card, stop. You need a personal bank account, a business bank account, a personal debit or credit card, and a business debit or credit card.

Brian: The purpose for this is to help you. If it's not painfully obvious is it makes your taxes and your accounting and your bookkeeping so much simpler.

Brian: bonus tip here. This is also a really good time to get a business credit card with some sort of cool bonus for flyer miles. for example, I have well over a [00:10:00] million MX points right now, just MX points, not including my chase points, which is another few hundred thousand.

Brian: And the cool thing about this is, I got a credit card bonus for just signing up for the card. I think for the Amex gold card, which is what I use for my business. It was a hundred thousand point bonus, which you can, they're hard to find, but you can find them a hundred thousand point bonus, for my Amex gold business card.

Brian: And then I also get three points per dollar spent on. Facebook ads and meta ads, and we spend close to 1, 000 a day on that. so I get 3, 000 points per day, give or take just from my Amex cart onMeta ad spend, which is like 000 points a month

Brian: and the thing about the MX card? If you don't know it's not really like a credit card. You're not building out your credit line It's a cash card meaning you have to pay it off every month so this is good for people who don't want to have a bunch of debt and it's just so that I can Make a bunch of credit card points and then I just paid offevery single month on auto pay.

Brian: I don't even think about my credit card payments. They're all on justpay in full every single month on auto pay That can be Another bonus tip. Just set all your credit cards to auto pay every month so you never have to think about it. You never forget it.

Brian: Your credit [00:11:00] cards are all paid off and you're never worried about, racking up debt.

Brian: tip number nine, we're going to talk about clients here. As you start getting booked up as a freelancer and your demand increases and your calendar starts getting booked up more and more and you start building self confidence as a freelancer, always have a number that is your no number.

Brian: And this is the number that you will not do a project below this number. This is again, it's been happening. My wife, she just had her best month ever as a content creator, influencer, and she gets offers all the time that are like well below what she should be charging for her size as a content creator.

Brian: in the past, before she's really building her confidence, she just take it and like it's money. It's fine. But as she's become more and more demand. and she's built up her audience in the size of followers she has she has to say no to more and more projects because when you say yes to a project that is below your worth you are potentially saying no to a project who willpay what you're worth in the future for example there's only so much inventory can do for promoted posts on her TikTok and Instagram accounts.

Brian: So when she says yes to an underpaid project, she potentially has lost out a spot she could take on and a client that will [00:12:00] pay her worth. And also many times, again, this is something I've seen in my freelancer career for myself, for our clients is when someone comes to you under budgetbelow your quote, no number.

Brian: And you just say, so sorry. To get what you're asking for would be 3, 000. but if you only have 1, 000, here's what I could do for you when you have that strategy where, Hey, here's what your budget can't afford you. you can get one song as a music producer, you want five, you only can get one at that budget.

Brian: Or if you want five songs, it's going to be 5, It's amazing how many times people magically come up with a budget. It's happened with my wife. She will. Tell them what the rates are, she'll stick to her guns on the rates, and all of a sudden they will pay it. I've seen it in my studio, where all of a sudden these bands will come up with random budgets.

Brian: I've seen it in B2B space, in the freelance world, with our clients, where all of a sudden people come up with a budget. So if you always have a good no number, as you build yourself confidence, you're going to start making more and more and more,and that's going to continue to increase your confidence as a freelancer, so that you continuously increase what that no number is.

Brian: Tip number 10. Kind of A productivity tip here. Anytime you're working on a project with a client, it is almost always [00:13:00] good to send early mock ups, early demos, early mixes, early drafts to the client for feedback. Communicate it's not a final product. Communicate we're in early stages. Communicate that it's not indicative of what the final will look like or feel like or sound like.

Brian: What the vibe will be, but it will save you so much headache, heartache, wasted time, wasted effort. If you get early feedback from clients so that you can shape what the final will look like. Cause here's the mistake. So many freelancers make. You obsess over V1. You put in so much time, effort, energy, cause you want to blow your client's minds.

Brian: You send it to the client. And it doesn't match what they want and they send you a long list of all things they want changed on it. And so you hate your client because you put so much work and effort into it. It's amazing. And if you're being honest, the next day you wake up and you look at it and you look at the notes and you're like, shit, they're right.

Brian: This isn't that good. And so you end up hating yourself. you can skip all that pain. If you just take an early draft, something you whip together very quickly based on templates and some early thoughts of what you wanted, send it to the client, get feedback or better yet get on a call with them, present the idea, present the mix, present the whatever it is to them.

Brian: The [00:14:00] draft. And get their feedback on the big picture stuff. What do you like? What do you not like? This will help me shape the final so I don't put a bunch of work into things you don't like. So that the real V1 Is what they actually want. And so your list of revisions is much shorter.

Brian: You hate your client less. You end up hating yourself less. Your business is better. You're better. You're welcome.

Brian: Tip number 11, follow up with every client once or twice per year to stay top of mind. I talked about this earlier in the automating basic followups, but if you just follow up with every single client you've ever worked with, Once to twice per year, twice a year is better,but there's a general check in general wellness check, anything that lets them know that you are alive and you care about them.

Brian: That alone will do wonders for your repeat business. You'll get more referrals because you'll be top of mind with that client twice a year so that when they see more clients that you could work with, they refer them to you. and then when your client needs those services again, Because you're top of mind and you've landed in their inbox at the right time, you're going to get more inquiries or more, repeat work from those clients.

Brian: So there's no downside whatsoever to following up with every single client you have once or twice per year. You will [00:15:00] make more money. Do you like more money? Just do that. You're welcome. just start saying you're welcome after every tip here.

Brian: Number 12. A technical one. Use Dropbox to keep your hard drive clear. Many freelancers work from laptops, especially Macbooks. they upcharge you ridiculous amounts to have a larger hard drive. So many people are working on those. 256 gigabyte hard drives and 512 megabyte hard drives.

Brian: Very few have the terabytes, even sometimes in certain spaces, terabytes are not enough, especially in video or audio. So what can you do? Even on your desktop computer, they may not have that much space. What can you do to clear up space? You can do external drives, that's fine. But the reason I like Dropbox is they have Cloud Sync, where you can have offline only files.

Brian: And the way I do it, I have, terabytes of files in my Dropbox account right now that I can access. I can search they're indexed on all my computers. I have like four laptops. I have like old Mac books. I have duplicates. I have my current Mac book in one pro. I have my desktop computer up here and all these computers, I can open them up and I can see every one of my files because it's synced to my Dropbox folder.

Brian: I can search for them, but they're not taking up any [00:16:00] hard drive space until I hit right. Click it and say, Make available offline. And now that file is on my computer and because I have Google Fiber here,it downloads very quickly. Even large files. So that's a fun little quick tip for you.

Brian: Side note, this is for my people who are chronically online. Bonus tip. Have more than one internet connection at your house. You never know when one goes out. So I currently pay for and have Google Fiber. I have Verizon 5G internet. And I have Xfinity internet in my house. All three at the same time, all running.

Brian: Because even a day offline would cost me money. And I just I can't have it. Tip number 13. Another little quick tech.Did you know you can make QR codes with Chrome either on desktop or on mobile? It's easier on mobile, which you can find on desktop.Just Google how to make QR codes with Chrome and you can find it.

Brian: But how do you use it? What do you actually use it for? If you're doing any sort of in person networking where you want to share websites or multiple websites or your, link in bio, like the little page with a bunch of links in it any of those sorts of things, you can make QR codes for those so that anytime you're in person with someone.

Brian: And you're talking about business or there might be a good referral. It's just like, Hey, scan this QR code. It'll take you straight to my [00:17:00] site or to my inquiry forum or to whatever.

Brian: And so you can do this with any website, any page, any landing page, any funnel page, anything you want that you need to send people to potentially in person. You can just have those screenshots of a QR code, or if you're at a, booth, one of our clients rented a at a festival for his friend's business.

Brian: which for his niche, it made sense because it's kind of a general public kind of offer. And on his booth, he had QR codes for his website and he got tons of traffic from that.

Brian: So that is tip number 13 is making QR codes with Chrome very easily.

Brian: Tip number 14 is following the two minute rule for emails only really.First, let me explain two minute rule. I'll tell you what I like about it, what I don't like about it and why I just recommend it for email.

Brian: But thetwo minute rule is if a task takes two minutes or less, just do it right now. Do it immediately.

Brian: The reason I don't love this is because you can end up wasting your entire day away doing just two minute tasks that don't really amount to anything. But with email as a freelancer, these are really important. So when you get an email in your inbox, whether it's from a client or from a prospect or from a referral or whatever, if it takes less than two minutes for you to [00:18:00] respond, the second you see that email, just respond to it.

Brian: this keeps you from just building up all these emails in your inbox that you have to batch all together at once. And you'll find when you do sit down to batch emails at the end of the day or half of the day or whatever your email batch time is, you're going to have way fewer emails to deal with in there.

Brian: So that's why I think the two minute rule works really well for email because you're checking your phone throughout the day. At different intervals, but when you're taking small breaks, especially if you work with the Pomodoro technique where you're working 25 minute intervals and you take, five minutes off, something like that.

Brian: So that's a quick tip for productivity is justfollow the two minute rule, just for emails. Tip number 15. I love this one. Use the iPhone shortcuts, the iPhone keyboard shortcuts for commonly used phrases or links or whatever. So like if you do DMS a lot in Instagram or Tik TOK, or you text a lot

Brian: and there's like links you send all the time or little templates or snippets as you send all the time, or it's like thesame thing or just replying from your phone on emails, you can create your own templates in the keyboards area. So just go to your, if you're on iPhone, go to settings.

Brian: Then general, then keyboard. And in there they have something called

Brian: text replacement. They call it text [00:19:00] replacement. And in the text replacement area, you can put any. shortcut of keys. So I like to put things like exclamation point one, not one exclamation point, but it's things you wouldn't normally type out. Another one could be like at sign or exclamation point, exclamation point, but put some sort of numbering system together where it's like a symbol and a number so that the most common go to things.

Brian: It could be that exclamation point one is your website URL. Exclamation point two is your quote request form on your website. It could be that at sign one is your, general follow up email. at sign two is your, general inquiry response when someone asks for pricing info and you send them to your quote request form.

Brian: So you can put whatever you want as far as typing out a full sentence, but the short symbol. So anytime you type exclamation point one, it'll just autocorrect with a link or autocorrect with a response.

Brian: But it's a really good like hacky kind of way to get templates on your iPhone instead of having to have them copy pasted in a note or to use some third party app that saves templates. Love this one. Tip number 16. This is for my referral friends out there. So all you freelancers who just rely on [00:20:00] referrals, that is called hope marketing in most cases, because you generally are waiting around for referrals, doing nothing for referrals.

Brian: You can incentivize referrals though. And ifyou're going to incentivize referrals,

Brian: I recommend you incentivize your clients, not with money, not with gift cards, not with discounts,

Brian: but with a two way incentive. Here's how this works. You'll see this a lot in other businesses. The first way is incentivizing your client for referring someone to you and you incentivize them through a nice, thoughtful gift. I can tell you from experience. I can tell you from seeing this amongst other people.

Brian: All the freelancers work with, I can tell you from the clients I've worked with in the past, your clients will care way more about a thoughtful 50 to 100 gift than they ever would about a 500 discount or even a cash incentive. because a lot of times people feel icky about referring people to you for monetary incentives.

Brian: want to feel like they're doing it with the best intentions in mind for their friends, right? So incentivizing via money is less effective than just a nice, thoughtful gift, a nice bottle of wine, a nice gift basket, you know your client well, you should be able to come up with something that [00:21:00] is thoughtful to that specific person.

Brian: that's the client side. What about the referee side, the person who's being referred to you? That's the one you can incentivize with discounts or some sort of extra thing for free. In some cases, there might be some sort of additional fee for additional services or additional fee for, some sort of physical product or a physical book or physical masters or something, whatever the physical thing is, you can give them that for free.

Brian: If they're referred to by one of your clients, so now your clients have a really cool incentive structure for referring leads to you because they know that the client's taking care of because, hey, hit me up when you need to record with them because he's going to give you a free whatever, or he's going to give you a discount I refer you to him, So they know their friend's going to get a discount if they refer them to you. And they also know they're going to get a nice gift from you, a nice thoughtful gift. So that number 16 is referral incentives, that dual incentive, not money, but thoughtful gifts being thoughtful. And then for the other side, the person being referred to you, offer them discounts, offer them free things, Something that makes your client look awesome for making that connection for them.

Brian: That leads me to tip number [00:22:00] 17, and that is this. Actually ask for referrals. Holy shit. you're just waiting around for clients to refer you. Have you actually asked for referrals from your clients?

Brian: Easiest time to do it. The project is done. Unless you're recurring. There's another time in recurring if you're just on a monthly retainer. But for the project based freelancers out there, if you are done with a project, the client's super happy with the project. Ask for a referral right then and there easiest kind of template or framework to follow is you're my favorite client Do you know anyone else like you put it in different words than that?

Brian: But it's just you're essentially saying to the person loved working with you. You were like the perfect type of client for me Do you happen to know any other people just like you because I would love to clone you flatters them And it also makes them think is there anyone else like me? Yes. I know Joe.

Brian: He's a business owner like me He needs a new website his website sucks You Let me send you his way. You'll do an awesome job with his website. Just asking you'll get more referrals. Surprise.

Brian: so that's tip number 17 is ask for referrals. Before I get into tip number 18, We got like eight more here. a lot of things I'm throwing at you. I'm going all over the place because this is just tips episode, right?

Brian: best advice to you is the ones from this episode that stand [00:23:00] out, just write down in your notepad, on your phone, physically, if you're around someone that you can write and just list out the things that you're like, Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I need to do that.

Brian: I need to make sure that I just do one W nine for the entire year. So I don't forget that I need to make sure I put a process in place for asking for referrals. I need you to set up those keyboard shortcuts on my phone so I can get those most common replies that I always have to type out by hand and I hate doing.

Brian: I need you to do that. And then the rest of these, they're fine. They'll be there one day, but just list out the ones you really want to implement. So you don't forget these. Pause the episode, write those down and come back for tip number 18.

Brian: Tip number 18, follow the three task rule each day. This is something I've been doing for years. I love this.

Brian: I have a notepad

Brian: at the top, beginning of every day. I used to do this before I went to bed, but then I found It made my brain turn on in a way that shouldn't be turned on right before bed. So I now do this after breakfast, before starting my day, I plan out my day. I do the three biggest things that have to get done.

Brian: Every day without fail, the three big things I want to push forward my life. And then below that, I'll just stack up all the little tedious shit. That doesn't really matter. Things that are like nice to get done things that are like, if they don't [00:24:00] get done, the world doesn't end if I do them, it'll feel nice.

Brian: Checking them off. lot of people, they just. And let's do these tasks that are just nice to check off, but they don't actually push your business forward. So if you just do the three task rule each day, just the three big tasks, bold them, underline them, set them apart at a different column or tier on your list if you need to.

Brian: But those three things are the things you do every day and you plan those out ahead of your day. So you're not just reactively jumping from thing to thing to thing. There have been days where I didn't do this and I find myself just reacting to things on slack for my team, reacting to things from clients, reacting to, X, Y, and Z versus actually pushing my business forward.

Brian: Tip number 19. It's a weird one. Pay for good software. I've seen so many freelancers cheaping out even higher earners, a hundred K or more a year who won't pay for really basic software to do areally important things in your business,So ask yourself this. Anytime a software presents a paywall, you just say, will this pay for itself? Five X or 10 X. Each month or each year, if so, you pay it a hundred percent of the time. You never don't pay that. There are literally many softwares that are out there.

Brian: A CRM, for example, a CRM customer relationship management software, [00:25:00] a good CRM will cost you 50 to a hundred bucks a month, and it'll do a lot of things for you. It'll automate reminders. It will automate followups. It will remind you to follow up with clients. It will do all sorts of things.

Brian: But at the end of the day, what it helps you do is close more clients. And in many freelancer worlds, closing one client could be worth five or 10, 000. And when you're looking at even on the high end of a CRM, 100 a month times 12 months at 1, 200. So if it helps you close one more client. It is paid for itself almost 10x, but time and time again, I see people cheaping out.

Brian: They try to get some free CRM HubSpot, for example, because it's free. And the best features of things that are going to help you the most are the most gated, right?

Brian: Talking to a client recently, Vimeo Pro was, the example here. He used the free version of Vimeo. So he's running paid ads. He's spending, 500 to 1000 bucks a month on paid ads. Having really good results, but because he's not using Vimeo pro, we can actually see the detailed analytics on the videos in his funnel.

Brian: So we don't have people where people are dropping off. How many people are actually watching the video? There's a lot of things we can do to optimize the funnel if he was using Vimeo [00:26:00] pro. So when you're spending. A thousand bucks a month on ads, those optimizations really matter.

Brian: And it's like 19 bucks a month or something. It's like really small.

Brian: Another one is social media planners. there's like so many social media planners out there where you're scheduling your posts, you're planning out your months, stuff, so you can batch it versus like always being on the content train. social media planners can help you. Organize your things, schedule things out, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: The good ones can at least, and many people won't use them. You'll do everything manual. You'll manage multiple social media accounts and you won't spend the relatively small amount of money for a good social media management app or social media planner app.

Brian: So number 19, just pay for good software. If there's a problem or a pain in your business, there's usually something out there that can solve it. If there's a way to make money in your business, there's probably something out there that can make it better.

Brian: That leads us to tip number 20, which is the opposite of this. Do a software audit each quarter, or at least every year, where you actually look on your bookkeeping app or your bank statements or whatever, and you look at every piece of software charging you money every month or every year. And you just audit that.

Brian: You say, do I actually use this? Is it bringing me value?

Brian: If not, cancel it. If [00:27:00] so, keep using it.

Brian: In my company, I spend an average of 200 a month, in software expenses. And every month, I have a call with my bookkeeper, and we will audit certain softwares, and I canceled two last month.

Brian: So it can be really easy for all the software you pay for it to really build up again, 3000 a month, 3200 a month is a lot, but that software runs my business. It helps me save from having to hire out a bunch of team to do things for me manually is well worth the 200 a month.

Brian: I pay

Brian: tip number 21.

Brian: If you're using a bank account that does not have sub accounts in it, get out of it. So many people are using like bank of America, Wells Fargo, big business banks. And. Not only are they horrible to work with in a B two B's perspective, but they also don't have a lot of the features that some of the cool, like tech-focused software focused banks can do.

Brian: So I use Novo. I've talked about it in the podcast before. I have a video that covers this on six figure creative.com/novo. But the reason I use this bank, and there's others like it, is that it has sub accounts that I can automate payments into it. So anytime, let's just say a thousand dollars comes into my account, it'll automatically send 400 of that to my.

Brian: Operating expenses account, it'll send. [00:28:00] 200 bucks of that to my tax payment account. It'll send however much to my owner draw account and another percentage to my profit account. So this is the profit first system. The reason I like it is this one bank account with automated sub accounts so that I always have tax savings. I always have profit savings.

Brian: I always have my owner's drawer, my owner's payment coming out of that I know when I'm paying myself each month and it has my general operating expenses for paying software, for paying my team, for paying my employees. All the things takes to run my business.

Brian: And while I still have a bookkeeper and I still have a CPA, this allows me to just big picture, day to day, month to month, run my business without having to think about all those things.

Brian: It also ties into Stripe, it ties into PayPal, it ties into, my bookkeeping app.

Brian: So tip number 21, find a bank that A, is just good like this, and B, has automated sub accounts in it.

Brian: Tip number 22 is, if you're making, Over 35, 000 a year as a freelancer, probably over 30, 000 a year.

Brian: Get a CPA. Don't try to do taxes yourself. Just get a CPA.

Brian: It'll make your life so much easier. They'll find ways to save you in taxes. You'll get less slaps from the [00:29:00] government. Which leads me to tip number 23. Ask your CPA about deducting home office expenses. So this office that I'm in right now for this episode. The square footage of this, the square footage of my wife's office behind me, up to a certain extent is tax deductible.

Brian: that means the mortgage I pay in this house, the bills I pay for this house, we take a certain percentage of that and write it off on taxes.

Brian: That is awesome. Essentially brings my cost of living down because I run my business out of my house. Those are things you can't necessarily do accurately, and you can easily mess up and get an audit and then get slapped on the wrist by the IRS. If you try to do this yourself, that's why I think a CPA is very important.

Brian: That leads me to tip number 24, If you're making over 150, 000 a year. So for my higher earning freelancers, get a bookkeeper. They are well worth whatever you're having to pay them. just for. Reference. I pay mine 750 a month, something like that. And they handle all my books for the month.

Brian: They update them every single week so I can check in my account and my books are updated and all my expenses done. And I have a nice profit and loss statement to look at every week, every Tuesday they do it. So I just checked it. Now, when I looked at my software expenses, it has been updated as of yesterday.

Brian: And then also every month, at the beginning [00:30:00] of the month, I talk to my bookkeeper and we have a long conversation about different expenses to make sure they're categorized correctly. We do projections for the next month and making sure I have everyone's paid and all things are accounted for. And it, again, it makes my peace of mind go through the roof when I know that everything's paid for, everything's accounted for, all the bookkeeping stuff is done.

Brian: Makes my CPA's life easier and well worth it. And that leads me to tip number 25. Last one in here, probably my favorite one in here is if you're making over 100k a year, or even honestly 50k a year, if you're full time, know your buyback number and start hiring help. term buyback number is from the book, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.

Brian: Really good book. I highly recommend it,

Brian: but the way you calculate your buyback numbers, you just take your annual income. He recommends dividing it by 2000, which is about how many hours most people work. If you work at a40 hour work week. So if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, you divide it by 2000 hours. That means 50 bucks an hour is about what you make.

Brian: Now, obviously you don't want to just hire someone out for 50 bucks an hour. So if you divide that by about four, three or four or five, whatever you feel comfortable with. That's your buyback number. Anything below that number, you should be [00:31:00] hiring out if you can get someone to do it for you for that number.

Brian: So I think at a hundred K you should be buying back your time for 15 to 20 bucks an hour. That's a little higher than Dan Martell's recommendation. I think his is like 10 to 12 an hour. I was buying back my time for 30 bucks an hour and crushing it

Brian: at the beginning of my six figure freelancing journey where I just cracked six figures and I was bottled act and, really struggling for time. And so I hired somebody to help with all of the like left brain Do this then do that all the file management and session prep and naming things and importing things and exporting things all the things that like anyone with a brain who understands pro tools, which is tool we use in my world and can follow a checklist and a video guide.

Brian: Anyone can do that. I was paying him 30 bucks an hour to do that, but that allowed me to ramp up my hourly paid what I was actually earning per hour of my time up to like 350 an hour as a freelancer. that was what that enabled me to do.

Brian: The reason I could do that, by the way, is because I was not working 2000 hours a year. I was probably working 1200 hours a year,

Brian: but just here's some general guidelines. If you're a hundred K a year right now, as a freelancer, find people to hire [00:32:00] for 15 to 20 bucks an hour to do some of the tedious tasks that take up time. There's a little time wasters. You can even find really good talent at that price point. They could do really good creative tasks from other countries.

Brian: South America and Southeast Asia are two good places to look. So if you think about this, if you're somebody who does like video editing. Web design, any of these things where at the end of the day, there's certain things that need to be done for a project. Then you can to someone in the Philippines to do for 15 bucks an hour is a really good pay over in the Philippines.

Brian: 15 bucks an hour will go a long way. Get really good talented people to do stuff while you sleep and when you wake up It's done ready for the next day so you can really speed up your workflow if you're making 200k a year for my even higher earner freelancers that's almost in the agency or micro agency world Anything that you're doing that's under 30 to 40 dollars an hour You should be hiring out help for

Brian: and it just goes up from there There's my 25 tips for a freelance survival guide

Brian: Lots of little things that slowly add up over time to make your life better to save you money to save you time save you heartache Again, just write a few down to implement,

Brian: God, please don't try to do all of these, but there's a few you heard in this episode that you're like, Oh God, that's a great idea. I should do [00:33:00] that. Those are the ones to start with.

Brian: And while these tips are great, this is definitely what I would call like an advice buffet. Choose the bits and pieces that you like, ingest those, digest those, and then skip all this stuff you don't like,these episodes are great, but they're not going to necessarily transform your business.

Brian: These are again to just make your life a bit better in a lot of different ways if you need transformation Consider looking into and applying for clients by design.

Brian: It's our coaching program that predominantly focuses on client acquisition. There's other things we help with but that's the big transformation we focus on with our clients because that's the thing that freelancers struggle with the most is actually getting consistency with clients, getting reliability with their projects, sticking to their guns with pricing.

Brian: We literally had a client recently who when talked about pricing on a sales call the client laughed at him because pricing was apparently so ridiculous And then the very next call after we coached him through talking him off the ledge of dropping his prices down The very next call he closed the client who just didn't add an eye at it.

Brian: So just things like that are way more helpful. If you want somebody to support you through this, create a full plan for you. What we consider is the [00:34:00] best practices for your specific business. Given all the information we have on you. When we gather that information, we will create a plan for you. We will pitch that plan to you.

Brian: If you don't like it, we part ways, you owe us nothing, but that's a great way to get started with us to see if we are aligned on what we should do for your business, to make it better, to make more money, to transform it from where it is now to where you're trying to go.

Brian: If you want more information on that, just go to six figure creative. com slash coaching. There's a video on that page that walks you through all the details on it. And then from there you can apply and see if you're a good fit for our January cohort to get started in the new year. So that's all I got for you in this episode of the Six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: See you next week.