The “Power Hour” Method (How Smart Freelancers Work)

384. Prioritization and Bottlenecks

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Brian: [00:00:00] Do you ever feel like you were working nonstop for weeks and months and years, but somehow after all this time you were still stuck in the same place?

Brian: Well, in this episode I'm gonna show you how you can get way more outta the hours that you already have, both at the micro level, like what are you actually. Do during your days. And then on the bigger picture, the macro level, what you're actually working on in your business. And the goal here is to

Brian: figure out what actually matters in your business so you can stop wasting energy on the wrong things. 'cause if, remember, if you arenot making progress in your business and you're spending hours every day and days, every week and weeks, every year andon your business with little to no progress, you know you're working on the wrong things.

Brian: And remember, we all have the same 24 hours in every day. No one has the advantage there. In the last week's episode, I asked the question, why can some people get more done than others in that 24 hour period? Now, one lever you can pull is trade-offs, AKA?

Brian: What are you willing to give up in the short term to gain what you want in the long term? That's what last week's episode was all about. What are you willing to give up to get what you want? now the other [00:01:00] lever and the focus of today's episode is working on the right things, AKA prioritization.

Brian: at the end of this episode, I'm also gonna walk you through the three biggest issues that hold freelancers back from properly prioritizing. Because knowing how to prioritize and actually prioritizing are two completely different things. Now, if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative podcast.

Brian: This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more from their creative skills without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you're at the right place. I take a lot of influence from a lot of different areas, a lot of different businesses that I've run, a lot of businesses that I can't continue to run.

Brian: A lot of the clients that we work with, and then my team of 11 plus people at this point from all over the world, who all bring different flavors of business and marketing and systems and processes with them. We have a lot to pull from in the six figure creative community, and my goal is to bring all of those learnings to this podcast for you, the listener who may be relatively isolated.

Brian: Maybe you are an entrepreneur who doesn't really have entrepreneurial friends. Maybe you're the only business owner, you know, and how are you supposed to learn how to run your business if you don't have others around you? my goal is to [00:02:00] be one of hopefully many influencers that you have from other podcasts.

Brian: Influencers, I'm not influencer, but the real influencers, the big guys out there, you know, the Christos of the world. Hopefully you have those other people in your ears too. I am privileged to be one of those for you today and hopefully you'll stick around. Now let's talk about how to get the most out of your time, the time that you have, the 24 hours.

Brian: And I first need to talk about why prioritization matters more than time itself. ' cause remember, we all have the same 24 hours. if everyone has the same 24 hours, then we know that. Some people are wasting this 24 hours pretty poorly. this is the most insidious part about prioritization.

Brian: It's not like you are sitting around in your ass doing absolutely nothing all day, every day. And that billionaires are out there, literally working 24 hours straight with no sleep, and they have some drug they're injecting into their veins to stay up 24 hours a day so they can work more and make more money than we'll ever be able to do.

Brian: It's not like that at all. It's just that certain people. Are better at prioritization. Now, I'm not gonna get into the ethics behind billionaires and all that stuff, but let's just,bring it down to an an even playing field for freelancers out there. Why are some freelancers more successful than [00:03:00] others?

Brian: Some of it's skill, some of it's creativity, some people are just naturally the absolute pinnacle of their craft and will sometimes yield better results. Some people are nationally more charismatic,and so there's the it factor. They just are more likable and you just can't compete with that.

Brian: But. On a relatively even playing field, most people who are successful generally are better at prioritization. And if you spend your time without proper priorities, you are generally most likely wasting effort.

Brian: And I've been through seasons in my own life where I've worked. 10, 12, 15 hours a day and accomplished less in the grand scheme of things, did less for my business than in seasons in my life where I was working two hours a day. And it's just because in those seasons where I was only working two hours a day, I was so hyperfocused and ruthless with what I was actually working on, which should be the right things that The other six hours ultimately didn't matter much. Now obviously, like if you can work six to eight to 10 amazing productive hours that are really focused and really prioritized properly, you're going to go to [00:04:00] new heights, never before reached.

Brian: But most people like me don't have the energy to do that. So if you're low energy or you have a family or you have other things pulling you away, prioritization is the only way to make this work. Let's talk about micro first, micro, teeny tiny, itty bitty. What should you do throughout your day from sun up to sundown?

Brian: What should your days look like now? This is how I like them to be, and this is coming from the perspective of a full-time freelancer, someone who has got their entire day devoted to their business. If you have a day job, this is not gonna look the same for you. Unfortunately. You can take bits and pieces of it.

Brian: Generally, the people that I work with, the ones that I talk to all day, are already the full-time people. This is not like a beginner's podcast. And you listen to more than one episode, you probably already know. This

Brian: doesn't mean you can't get something outta this podcast if you're a beginner, but it does mean that there are probably better podcasts out there for you if you are a beginner, and there may be a lot of stuff that goes over your head. And also, I won't cater to beginners for this, so let's just assuming you're a full-time freelancer.

Brian: does your day look like on the micro scale? First thing I wanna talk about is something I call power hours. Power hours. This is where you block out the first one to two hours of your [00:05:00] day when you are the most sharp, when you're the most focused, when you have the most creative energy, the most brain power to focus on the most important growth activity in your business.

Brian: I used to call these my sacred work hours, and this would be like the hours where I just shut everything off and no one can talk to me, no one can text me, and it's still basically the same.

Brian: but I like the term power hours. They're a little more catchy.

Brian: But this is where you, figure out what your bottleneck is. What is the one thing that if I solve this, it fixes everything else in my business or it makes everything else in my business matter more. And this is also working what I call on your business. Working in your business is where you actually are doing your creative tasks.

Brian: You're, trading your hours for dollars. You're doing the creative work, you're making the deliverables. All that stuff can come later. We'll talk about when that fits in. But the first one to two hours is blocked out phone on silence. Put it in another room, put it in a drawer somewhere outta the way so that you can focus

Brian: and have zero distractions.

Brian: Now, there's a couple things that matter a lot here when it comes to your own power hours. One is knowing your own energy levels, what hours you like to operate the most, knowing your own schedule. I work on a very, very rigid schedule.

Brian: I am generally in bed [00:06:00] by eight 30 or nine asleep by nine 30 or 10. At 5:30 AM on the dot, my alarm goes off at that same exact time. Every day I read Morning Brew or Daily Hustle for 15 minutes. I get up, I pee, I weigh myself on my scale. That sinks with my phone and Apple Health.I get a thing of water and I go to the gym.

Brian: I, that's how regimented I'm, and I do the gym first thing in the morning.When I come back, I make breakfast.

Brian: and then I start my power hours.

Brian: For some of you, maybe you work out in the evening and maybe when you first wake up, that's the perfect time to have the power hours. Power hours, then breakfast or you breakfast and then power hours. Just find something that works for you. But I'm gonna skip all the minutia stuff, all the gym and wake up and reading and you are a cold plunge, bro.

Brian: And I've gotta do my sauna,

Brian: skip all that. And let's just focus on the things around your business. Power hours.

Brian: When you keep your phone away, it takes away that temptation to pull you out of the deep focused work you should be doing here. This is the stuff that hopefully you get into a nice rhythm, a nice, almost a flow state. Probably not the same that you would in creative work, but for some of you, you can get into a good flow state of fixing whatever thing is wrong with your business right [00:07:00] now.

Brian: Working on your business, not in your business. Working on your business as we're fixing the things that are gonna help the business grow. And most of you are putting zero hours per week into working on your business, or you're putting two hours here, 30 minutes there, zero hours here, two weeks with nothing at all.

Brian: Come back, oh, I gotta fix this thing. I never finished that. And that's what you're like working on your business. Looks likethe power hours one to two hours of every day should be your time. And I want you to think of it like the gym.People who are gym goers They don't find time. They make time for the gym to work for them. So they show up to the gym every day, whether it's after work or before work, but that's the time they're gonna work on their body, whether they're bodybuilding or doing fat loss, or they're doing yoga or Pilates or whatever thing it is, they're working on their body.

Brian: They make time to make that happen. Your power hours are essentially your gym time for your business. You're working on your business, you're building your business's booty. You're doing the big booty bootcamp every day for one to two hours.

Brian: And so if you bought a course, that's when you do the course. If you bought a business book, that's when you read that book and start [00:08:00] implementing. This is not education, but this is like implementation.

Brian: If you're building a new website for your business, this is the time you do that. If you're launching a new marketing campaign, this is the time you do that. If you're working on your packaging or your pricing, if you're working on new systems or processes or automating something, this is the time to do that.

Brian: And again, you don't find time. You make time for this. This is,prioritization. It means you do it first. Once that's done your first hour to two hours a day working on your business,

Brian: then we work on the creative stuff. Your actual skill, the thing you're,hired to do. And I'm not gonna give precise times here, but somewhere from, call it nine or 10 up through two to 3:00 PM ish. Or for you really early people, maybe your power hours are like six to seven or six to eight, and then eight to 10 or 11 is your actual, first batch of creative work. The stuff that requires the most mental energy, the most creativity. I'm not talking like revisions for clients that are just like, check the shit off a list and do it.

Brian: I'm talking like where you're making hard decisions, you're being creative, you are doing the creative stuff. Generally speaking, early in the day for most creatives tends to be if you're a full-time freelance. So it tends to be the place [00:09:00] where you can make the best, most creative decisions.

Brian: And the later you get in the day, progressively is where you start getting into creative fatigue, energy fatigue, your energy drains. You hit that two or three o'clock kind of lull. That's why I prefer to have creative work before lunch as much of it as I can now, after your creative lunch or even in the middle of your creative lunch.

Brian: That's where we have what I call your not a shitty lunch. You throw your not a shitty lunch in. That doesn't mean eating chicken nuggets. Going to Chick-fil-A and getting nuggets and fries doesn't mean eating just like junk food. It means eating something that's gonna make you feel good. It's gonna give you energy because during the day what you eat at lunch is going to dictate how your afternoon goes, And if you eat horribly for lunch, you're gonna have a pretty bad afternoon. Generally speaking. Now you know your body better than I do, but I just know my body well enough to know this. So when I say a not shitty lunch, I mean something that's going to have balanced macros. Not too high calorie,

Brian: not too low calories. We're not starving ourselves, but something that's gonna give you the energy that you need.

Brian: Then from lunch onwards, we can go from creative work into progressively less creative work over time. So if that means we're finishing up the project we were working on [00:10:00] before lunch, great. If that means that we did our most important creative stuff in the mornings, and then afternoons right after lunch is when I start doing my revisions and you start scaling it off from there into eventually technical work, admin work, checking emails.

Brian: Things are gonna pull you outta creative mode.

Brian: Now one important thing throughout this is anytime you're working during your power hours especially or during your creative work, for sure, and even post-lunch, your semi creative work, or if you're doing any creative work after lunch during this time as well. We don't want fluff work. We wanna kill all the fluff work before these times.

Brian: We let fluff work. Wait for the afternoon. Fluff work is checking your emails. Oh my god. Checking your emails first thing in the morning. Please don't do that.The reason for this is I would prefer if every freelancer, if it's possible, if it's at all possible, wait until after lunch to check your emails.

Brian: And in certain circumstances, I know this can't happen, but the reason I prefer this is one bad email. Your client sends you this list of stupid ass revisions and just pisses you off. That throws you out [00:11:00] of creative mode. It puts you into fight or flight. It takes you outta the power hours you were planning.

Brian: It just throws off your entire day. It emotionally damages you. And same thing for certain news outlets.

Brian: Anything that pulls you out of creative mode should be saved until the afternoon. And you know yourself well enough to hopefully know that if your inbox could be a minefield, if certain news outlets could be a minefield, things happening in the world that just like emotionally affect you and pull you out of the creative mode, then chances are maybe you need to just isolate yourself, protect yourself until the afternoon.

Brian: Once the afternoon comes, that's where you go to war. Like I said, progressively less creative work and it helps me, I dunno about you, but it helps me if I break it up with either walks at this point. So I'll break it up with walks in the afternoon, do podcast walks, or just short I say short for me, 20 minute walks is like a, a normal walk for me so that I can come back fresh I think that is, like my transition period from creative mode into like now time to do admin tasks.

Brian: Or alternatively, you can do a location change. So I'm a member of a coworking, thing in Nashville called Switchyards. It's like a, they call it a quote, neighborhood work club, [00:12:00] and it's like a hundred bucks a month.

Brian: it's like a unlimited coffee there. It's very bare bones as far as coworking spaces go, but it's really cool if you're in Nashville. highly encourage it.But there's like four or five or six locations here in Nashville. You can work at any one of 'em for like a hundred bucks a month, and I get more than a hundred dollars out of the coffee that I drink there every day.

Brian: I probably drink two or three cups a day there, and I'm probably there two to four days a week. So you do the math on that.

Brian: But the reason I do that is because my afternoon, even if I eat a good, healthy lunch, that's where my energy just starts to lull. It's like it just hits a wall and drops off. No matter what I do. I wouldn't say no matter what I do, if I eat horribly, it's even worse. So even eating healthy, good macro meals, I,buy meals from a meal prep company called Vibrant Meals.

Brian: They're based outta Nashville in Chattanooga. If you're there, I highly encourage you. Check out their meals. they're expensive. But it's just one of those things that I can order them on. Thursdays, they show up on Sundays and they're my meals for the week, and I don't have to think about it. I just can heat it up, eat it, enjoy it.

Brian: But the macros are good. Flavors are pretty good. Some are hit or miss, but it's just like any kinda meal prep company.

Brian: When I go on walks, it helps boost my energy. If I change locations [00:13:00] to a new place like my coworking space, it again changes my energy. If you don't have a coworking space, a coffee shop is perfectly acceptable, and that's what I did for years before. Coworking spaces were actually a thing. But the whole point is to structure it in a way that is going to yield the best results by prioritizing the most important things, which is the things that actually grow your business long term.

Brian: Or I know in certain seasons maybe you've got that big project that you have to crush and you know you need to do as much as you can to make this project a success. So those are what you put in your power hours. Completely fine in seasons, in small short seasons where this is like a project I have to do, but what we don't want to happen is for you to.

Brian: Overcommit, which is a whole other conversation where it's like, how do you actually schedule projects back to back to back so you don't over commit or have too many things on. You never wanna get to the point where you have to use your power hours for work all the time because you're so bad at managing your time throughout the day.

Brian: I wasn't planning on this, but this I think is aA good addition to this episode when it comes to micro strategy. before I get into the macro, like the big picture prioritization strategy, like what do you actually work on in your business throughout the day? I do wanna talk about scheduling.

Brian: 'cause this is something I just,talked about and I [00:14:00] was like, I don't have it in this episode outline, but I'll just,I'll riff on it for a second. A lot of freelancers, what they do is they get a project in and they'll start working on it. This is especially common in the design space, web design, brand design, anything like that where you can have overlapping projects.

Brian: Now, recording studios, which is my background, recording studios not as common. And this is where scheduling became natural to me because in the studio you can only have one band physically in the studio with you at a time. So you have to schedule these back to back to back. I developed a really good way of scheduling that worked for me, and I've helped other freelancers develop the same or similar type of scheduling for themselves.

Brian: And that is where you, any project that you work on, you should know how long it should take you to actually fulfill on the work. So it may be, let's just say it's a brand project and you know that it'll take you X hours a day for this amount of time to work on this project. Plus revisions and Revisions are usually afternoon. You fit those in as needed. They're less creative work. It's usually just like nitpicky shit that just drains your soul away. Great. You can do this in the afternoon when you're likebrain dead already.

Brian: it's a wonderful time to do revisions. But when you get a project in and you know what the scope should be timeline wise, that's where you [00:15:00] schedule it on your calendar. Literally use a calendar like Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, whatever. Block off your schedule for that project. And if you can do two at a time, then block off two people on your calendar for this time and that way you know that if another project comes your way, the earliest you can start is let's say two weeks from now or a month from now.

Brian: We have a client right now, she does 20 $5,000 branding projects. And they're pretty intense. And so she can really only take on one a month right now. And so she just landed two new clients. She booked them out for this month and next month, and then she had another client just pay what I call a soft hold, a deposit that she collected on the sales call where it soft holds the following month after that, which is a sales strategy.

Brian: I'm not gonna get into all that right now, but she takes a deposit to hold certain dates for the person until they get the rest of the funds together for the first payment. And that way she's stacking it up versus what a lot of freelancers do is I'll just take 'em all on right now and I'll try to juggle all these around, and now I'm slammed and all my power hours are gone, and I don't have any time for revisions and I can't even sleep now.

Brian: And now my creativity has fallen [00:16:00] because I've overextended myself. So a simple way to do scheduling is to simply block it out on your calendar and stack it up, and over time you'll get better at guesstimating how much time you need.

Brian: And I always encourage putting small buffers between projects.

Brian: So for my studios out there, what I would always do is I told bands it'd take one to two days per song.

Brian: The fewer songs, it is the closer it's gonna be to two days per song. So if they booked five songs, I generally put out eight to 10 days they need to book up on my calendar. I'd keep a small buffer at the end, one to two days. Those would be off days if it didn't go over, or it would be extra days if we needed them that they would again pay me for after those days.

Brian: if we finished early, I would refund a small amount of payment 'cause they basically prepaid for eight or 10 days. And if they went longer, they'd pay me more. Back then I was on a day rate. We're not gonna get into pricing here, but that's, the very quick summary of scheduling is just put it on a counter, block it out, and don't take on any more projects that overextend you so that you can have a normal eight hour workday and still do your power hours and still have a life, and still have a family and still go to the gym and still not be [00:17:00] stressed out all the time because you properly scheduled your days out.

Brian: That is somewhere in between micro and macro prioritization. Let's get into macro prioritization now. This is where we get into really what,considered strategy,

Brian: and this is just me talking about working on your business, not working in your business, working on your business, big picture, you're trying to build your business, make it larger, make it grow, get outta this plateau. You've been down to 50, 60, 70,000 a year. You're trying to get to what I call freelance minimum wage, which is a hundred thousand a year gross.

Brian: Because you generally, you're gonna net less than that. That's minimum wage is a hundred thousand a year. Most freelancers wanna get to now 200,000, 250,000 a year. So how do you do that? We know, for example, you're not gonna run ads if you haven't even nailed your offer here yet.We know you're not going to redesign your site if you can't even close leads yet.

Brian: and that's like, duh, I'm not gonna, run ads yet if I don't even have an offer or pricing or packaging down. I'm not going to redesign my site if I can't close people. 'cause I suck at sales. Why would I build a brand new website from scratch if I suck at sale? That brings up something called the Theory of constraints, or what I call bottlenecks.

Brian: you follow Alex or Mo, you've probably heard him talk about this. Your business will grow to the level of your [00:18:00] bottleneck. if you look at any bottle, a bottle of Coca-Cola, please sponsor me. Coke. Nope. I don't really want your sponsorship. Too much sugar. Fun fact, I have not had a Coca-Cola since I was 17. That was. 21 years ago. Woo. I'm 38. Shit. I'm old. Alright. Think about a Coca-Cola bottle. And you turn it upside down. It's going to gl gl, gl gl out the little bottleneck. Because that is a limiting factor on how fast the Coca-Cola can come out. Now, if you take scissors and you literally cut off the bottleneck and it's just a big tube and you turn it over, it's just going to all rush out at the same time.

Brian: That image is what your business likely looks like.

Brian: You've got all this energy in a bottle and you're trying to squeeze it through this tiny ass little pinpoint of a hole. For most people, it's lead generation. You try to squeeze all the energy to this tiny little hole, and no matter how much you do, no matter how much time you spend, no matter how much energy you put into that, that limiting factor is what is holding your business back.

Brian: Right now. It is nothing else. You can get better at your skill. You can have a prettier website, You can buy more gear, cool toys and shit, but if you don't fix that lead generation bottleneck, your business just won't grow. And [00:19:00] until that bottleneck's fixed, nothing else matters. Now you'll, do a lot of busy work. You'll be all the time slammed with work. You'll have more than you can possibly get done in a day.

Brian: And you're just like, oh my God, how am I gonna get this all done? But if none of that's actually addressing the bottleneck, you're wasting your time. Those things aren't holding you back. Another way of looking at it is if you look at your freelance business, like a garden hose, you turn your garden hose on, there's a kink in the hose, you know, where it like kind of doubles over on itself.

Brian: If that happens, the water flow coming out the other end is minimal. It's a trickle. And so you can put whatever little like attachment at the end of that garden hose. You can try all the fancy. Guns and widgets and whatevers that you can, and put it in all the settings. But water's just barely gonna trickle outta that thing cause.

Brian: There's little kinks in the water hose and nothing else matters until that kink is fixed. That is your business right now. So lemme give you a couple example of this One would be like if you have 20 leads come in every month, but you're not closing anybody. That's obviously a sales bottleneck.

Brian: It's not marketing. It's not pricing your packaging. It is a sales bottleneck, and so anything you do should be getting you better at sales so you can close more clients. Now we have an episode on this, actually, we have a bunch of episodes on [00:20:00] this,

Brian: but there's an episode I like specifically on this on episode 361 called he had 20,000 website visitors and a broken sales process. That's where I talk about something called sales efficiency. I'd be doing anything I can in that person's situation, focused only on fixing a sales efficiency.

Brian: That's it. Just working on a sales process.

Brian: And by the way, if you want to go to that episode, just go to six figure creative.com/the the numbers 3 6 1. Every episode is just the, three digit numbers.

Brian: Easy little cheat code there. Go and open that in a new tab while you're listening to this episode, and you go listen to it later.

Brian: well, let's go to another example. Maybe you're slammed with projects. You're busy all the time. You've got more projects than you can handle, but you are always broke for some reason, or you are fully plateaued and you just can't break through the plateau. Well, in that case, the bottleneck is your pricing.

Brian: It's not sales, it's not lead generation. We don't need to go out there and launch a new bunch of new campaigns.We don't need to work on your sales process or your sales efficiency. You're already slammed. You are what Hormoz calls.

Brian: Supply constrained. You're not demand constrained. There's no,constraint around demand. You are constrained by the supply of time that you currently have. As a freelancer, you only have [00:21:00] 24 hours in a day, right? So when that supply is dwindling and you only have so many hours in a day, the only thing to turn on that is.

Brian: Jack up your pricing. Now you could do systems, in that case, you could make your process more efficient, where you could start taking on more clients. But generally I've just seen very few situations in a freelance business where systems is truly gonna move the needle in a significant amount, not the same way pricing is

Brian: You can just jack up pricing 40%, you'll see a 20% decrease in the amount of people that work with you, and you'll net way more money with 20% less. Projects. That's a wonderful thing.

Brian: Now, let's do another example. Maybe you close every lead that comes in, but that's like three leads a year. if that's you, you, you're in a bad spot, but maybe it's only three leads a month and you need six or eight or 10, whatever. It's throw the numbers away. It'swhatever it is for you. It's just way fewer leads than you actually need.

Brian: Well, in that case, lead generation is your bottleneck. It's not your pricing. It's not your logo, it's not your website. It's just. Lead generation and lead generation. It sounds like those things kind of go together, but generally speaking, when we have somebody coming in and lead generation is the main issue, we don't touch their site until we [00:22:00] have the lead generation piece fixed

Brian: and we'll generally set up more focused funnels that you can fill through. Ads or socials or content or whatever unfair advantage that person has. Let's talk about the biggest issues here. I talked earlier about

Brian: the three biggest issues that hold freelancers back from properly prioritizing. That's these three things here.

Brian: issue number one is you're unable to clearly see or admit to your own true bottleneck. If that's you, this is a really frustrating place to be because you know something's wrong, but you don't know where to start. And if that's you, I encourage you to find someone who can help you pinpoint the main issue.

Brian: Get a second opinion, get some other perspective. Talk to somebody who's done this before. Issue number two is you know what your bottleneck is, but you don't have a clue how to fix it. And to me, this is the one that has the least validity. There's very little excuse in today's age to not know how to fix your bottleneck.

Brian: There are nearly 400 episodes on this podcast for every. Just about every conceivable solution that you would need to solve a bottleneck in your business when it comes to fulfillment or pricing or [00:23:00] packaging or lead generation or sales or whatever, like just good God to search through our episode backlog.

Brian: But there's also tons of other people talking about this stuff. People like Alex Ramey, he's talked about this stuff at length. He's written books about it. If this is you and you know what your problem is, but you don't know how to fix it, this is where you use your power hours to study up.

Brian: As the business owner, it's your job to know what's wrong and how to fix it. And if you don't know how to fix it, it's your job to learn how to fix it. You should have enough of an understanding about this stuff to know how all the pieces fit together.

Brian: Now issue number three is knowing what your bottleneck is, but still not prioritizing it. if this is you, this isa frustrating place to be because you admitted to yourself that business isn't important. if you look at what your time is going, not through your words, through your actions, that is saying, I am not prioritizing my business.

Brian: This is not important to me.

Brian: Me calling this out probably stings a little bit, but if you know what's wrong and you know how to fix it and you're not fixing it right now, then you're telling yourself that this isn't important to you. And I've said this before, business [00:24:00] isn't for everybody. Freelancing isn't for everybody. As soon as you start your freelance business, you start a true business.

Brian: Whether you want to admit it or not, as soon as you start accepting money for your skillset, and if you wanna be a business owner, you have to take the crap that you don't really wanna do, and you still have to do it anyways. It sucks, but that's part of it. And some people really struggle with reconciling that fact.

Brian: And for those people, you have kind of two options. Option A is to say, all right, I'm going to start prioritizing it and I'm gonna learn how to do this stuff and I'm going to. Reluctantly do it knowing it's best for my business, so that I have more time to spend doing the things I love to do. And a lot of those people grow to actually love the acts of marketing, sales, fulfillment, pricing, packaging, whatever they nerd out on this stuff they, realize they actually have a passion for it.

Brian: The other option you have is you can admit to yourself that I have no interest in doing those things. Therefore, shouldn't run a freelance business. I should get a job. Do something else. For some people that is the correct path, and I'm not here to tell you which one is for you. I'm here to challenge you so you can tell yourself which one makes the most sense.

Brian: Because knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, and still not doing it, you're telling yourself [00:25:00] over and over again that this isn't important to you. And so you have to make the decision am I finally gonna make this an important thing for me to do, or am I going to finally say it's time to stop and move on to something because there's a higher and better use of my time.

Brian: the most challenging one is for those of you who are in what I call zombie land. You make just enough to just barely scrape by and you have no interest in doing this stuff to fix your business, to make it any better, but you also have no major urgent action forcing you to make a decision because you're not going into debt, but you're also not thriving.

Brian: If that's you, I don't know what to tell you you're in the zombie land. Because you refuse to grow your business and you refuse to grow your business because you won't do the things that you required to grow your business. And if you're happy in Zombieland, more power to you. Maybe you found your happy place if that's you, great.

Brian: But for those of you who are in zombie land, meaning like you're just the walking dead, you are just scraping by. You just, barely have enough ends to make me, but you're never really like losing it, and somehow you get the energy to like save yourself when it gets too tough. If that's you, I would really encourage you to actually start taking this stuff seriously build out some accountability mechanisms in your [00:26:00] life.

Brian: Now, accountability mechanisms are those things that you put into place that hold you accountable. To do the shit you said you do. dumb things like stick.com. It's S-T-I-C-K k.com. So stick with two Ks can work for a time. I've used it before. It's a fun thing to do. I use it for like a weight loss journey.

Brian: You can use it for any kind of goal that you have, but the way it works is you have a referee, which you select. It can be a friend, a family member. I would say get the biggest a-hole in your life. will hold you to your shit no matter what, and make them the referee. then set the goal around something that has deliverables behind it, something you can prove that you're doing or not doing.

Brian: with a weight loss journey, I had my friend, who was my referee, and if I'm losing weight, I can just step on a scale and show him. And the way it works is you have your money tied to what they call an anti charity. If you believe in things politically that the left love and you're like left-leaning, your money goes to a,right-leaning political thing, you don't want your money to go there, right?

Brian: Or if you're right-leaning, you put your money towards left-leaning, political things. Or if you hate certain sports teams, you can donate to a sports team you hate, or whatever. The act of putting [00:27:00] any amount of money towards something you despise is a great motivating factor to get you to do the things that you don't wanna do.

Brian: So that's a good short term solution to maybe get you into the rhythm and routine of doing things. And for this to work, the referee that you choose has to be willing to say, you didn't do the thing, so you're gonna get docked X amount of dollars. It has to be a meaningful amount of money, not enough to like hurt you, but enough to start.

Brian: There's a big difference between actually hurting you and just stinging you. Another thing I recommend is just hiring a coach, joining a mastermind, building a mastermind. Whatever you have to do to get yourself around, people who know what the hell they're doing

Brian: can drastically speed this process up. Whether you don't know what your bottleneck is or you know what it is, but you don't know how to fix it or you know how to fix it and you know what it is, but you can't make yourself do it. This is where a mastermind.

Brian: Or a coaching program or something like that where you're around humans who are gonna look at you in the eye and say, why haven't you done the thing you said you're gonna do? Yet? Now, if you want our help spotting your bottleneck and coming up with a plan to solve it, this is what we do in our coaching program.

Brian: We first help you actually prioritize the right things in your business. We dissect your business from top to bottom. Figure out what's missing, [00:28:00] what's there that's not working, what's actually working? What unfair advantages do you have that we can exploit? And we build out a full marketing roadmap for you and essentially pitch it to you and we say, Hey, this is what we think are the right things to work on in your business.

Brian: Do you agree or you disagree? If you agree, then we actually coach you through executing those things one-on-one and making sure you're doing those things the right way. Because doing something and doing something the right way can be two completely different things. then the third thing is we actually hold you accountable to that plan to make sure you're actually doing it.

Brian: If you stop doing things, we follow up. We're reviewing all the work that you do to make sure it's done right and not just half-assed. The whole goal of this is to make sure that if you're bottleneck in your business is client acquisition. 'cause that's what we specifically help you with. If it's client acquisition, you need more leads.

Brian: You need to get better at sales, you need to nurture leads longer. You need to get your pricing, your package, your messaging, your offer, all that stuff fixed. If any of those things are the bottleneck in your business to solve it so that you can hit your income goals. And like I said, minimum weight is for freelancers in the current US environment, I think is a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Brian: Now I have an episode on this

Brian: I did [00:29:00] years ago. This is back in 2023. So over two years ago, why a hundred thousand dollars per year is the new minimum wage for freelancers? So that was two years ago. So it's like, what, $112,000 now? Something like that. But that's episode 262. So just go to six figure creative.com/ 2 6 2 to listen to that.

Brian: If you're like, Brian, what do you mean minimum wage I walk you through on that episode.

Brian: But if that's your goal, we can help you by going to six figure creative.com/coaching, fill out the short application, we'll walk you through all those things that I just talked through. Prioritizing the right things, fixing them the right way, and holding you accountable to actually fix a bottlenecks in your business.

Brian: So that's all I got for you today on the Six Figure Creative Podcast. Thanks for checking it out, and I'll see you next week. Peace.