The Step-by-Step Process for Solving Any Business Roadblock

337. Scientific Method

===

Brian: [00:00:00] Let's talk about the best method for solving any major problem in your business. If you are a business owner, right now you have problems in your business. The skeletons in the closet and some of those are very big skeletons. so if you have major problems in your business, those problems have to be solved.

Brian: And in this episode, I'm going to break down the best method for solving those problems. This method was created by some of the smartest people in the history of humanity, this has evolved over time. It is time tested. It is a proven way to solve problems like this, and it works perfectly for freelancers.

Brian: But here's how most freelancers solve problems. You have a problem, you ignore it. That's the first way. If you don't ignore it, you have a problem, you hear about some kind of idea, you want to try it out and putting that in air quotes, you want to try it out

Brian: and then you just kind of move on with life when that didn't immediately solve the problem or you kind of half implemented it. Those half built bridges.

Brian: and when you solve problems this way, those problems start to compound. Because again, I'm using solved in air quotes, because if you ignored it, you obviously didn't solve it.

Brian: And if you're the dabbler, like I talked about a second ago, where you're doing this half built bridges, that not only did you not solve the problem, you also [00:01:00] wasted a bunch of time dabbling, so it's in some ways worse than the ignore.

Brian: So not only do you have a lack of leads for your business, not only do you suck at sales in your business, not only does your pricing suck because you're too scared to raise your rates in your business,

Brian: You're also slow at fulfillment because of perfectionism. And you hate your clients because you let them walk all over you.

Brian: These are all solvable problems. Every single one of those things I just mentioned are solvable problems. Many people have some or all of these problems in their business right now. And you're either ignoring them, or you're just dabbling and half building bridges to the solutions and you're never actually fully solving these problems.

Brian: now this sounds really stupid and condescending, but it's worth repeating here. If the problem isn't solved. It won't go away. It doesn't magically solve itself. That's why I hate word of mouth as the main source of clients for freelancers because it lulls you into this false sense that the problem has been solved.

Brian: Where this feast or famine, when you finally are feasting again, that famine is not going to come again. And then when it inevitably does, because you're just relying on word of mouth that you do not control, now you start to realize, Oh, I actually have a problem. When the [00:02:00] famine comes back again, and now you're back in the same exact position you were before, where you have more month than money at this point.

Brian: Remember, we're talking about a problem solving framework in this episode. So when you don't solve the problems, that's when those things start to compound. They start to stack on top of each other one after another, after another, until you hate your business.

Brian: So in order to end this compounding effect of our problems stacking on top of each other, We have to start snowballing our problems and to snowball our problems. It means just solving the biggest one first.

Brian: throughout this episode, I really want you to take what's the number one problem, that big hairy problem. You know, you have that first big one on the start of our snowball right now. I want you to keep that top of mind as we talk to this episode, because it's going to be very helpful for you to have that top of mind as we think through this framework.

Brian: So what is the framework? What is the big thing I've been building up? It is the scientific method. It sounds really like a let down when I say it out loud. But the scientific method has been around for centuries. It has evolved over time. It has been created by tons of smart people, way smarter than me and you. It is used at very high levels for solving all sorts of problems. in all different mediums and it can be utilized by [00:03:00] freelancers to solve the problems of your business.

Brian: So in this episode, I'm going to break down the scientific method as it pertains to freelancers. this is a proven time tested approach to solving problems, like actually solving them, as opposed to ignoring or just half built bridges, right?

Brian: And when we actually solve the problems, we can start that snowball. ~Small, start with a big problem. We can start that snowball. ~So if you haven't heard of this podcast before, hello, I'm Brian hook. This is the six figure creative podcast. This podcast is for freelancers who offer creative services, and you'll want to make more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you're on the right spot from our returning listeners.

Brian: Welcome back. We are 300 and. 37 episodes into this, podcast at this point. So you know who I am. If you've been listening for a long time, a reminder, I'm about to outline the scientific method and how it, again, pertains to freelancers for solving problems, think through your number one problem you have right now. The big thing that keeps you up at night, right? The number one thing, don't worry about this, process for small, tiny problems, because it's likely overkill, but we're talking about those big problems, the things that can really affect your business in a good or a bad way, if it's solved or not solved.

Brian: This is what this method is great [00:04:00] at

Brian: ~All right, Leland. I'm going to screen share here and I want you to Go back and forth between me referring to this if I'm referring to it show it when I'm just talking You can just be back on me So have it on my face more than this image here because I'm gonna keep it up for probably a good chunk of this~

Brian: ~There we go.~

Brian: So if you're watching on YouTube right now, got the image of the actual scientific method up here. It's just a random image I found. There's a bunch of different small variations and tweaks to the scientific method, but this is the one I like the most.

Brian: Because it's simple. It's straightforward. It's easy to understand. ~And the biggest thing you can see in the image on YouTube, ~if you're listening right now, no worries, I'll explain each of the steps to you. You can also go to the show notes page at six figure creative dot com slash three three seven.

Brian: And the image will be somewhere on the page. If you scroll around. One of the first things you notice about this is it is a circle is a six step circle. And that's because. For the scientific method to work, it is coming at it with the approach that it will not be solved the first go around.

Brian: It is an iterative approach, meaning you go through this loop one time, And you have started the solution based on what you have learned, we're going to go through the loop again and again and again, because sometimes solving really large problems is more than just one thing.

Brian: And I think that's why so many people fail to solve the big problems in their life or in their businesses is because they go through the loop one time. The problem wasn't solved. They give up because they're frustrated and they just assume that that's how life is going to be for them.

Brian: ~I'm going to have to give you a different image that was the wrong one. That's the one I use for. Ads and coaching.~

Brian: ~There we go~

Brian: ~Hopefully you can do like a freeze frame or whatever for this to be the correct one during that whole spiel~

Brian: ~ ~so [00:05:00] let's talk through these six steps. I'm not even going to give you the overview because it's just a bunch of gibberish and scientific method terms. I want to really simplify this pertaining to you and the number one problem that you have in your mind right now.

Brian: The first up is observation slash question. What is the observation we've made in our business or what's the question that we have? Basically, what is the problem you're trying to solve or what's the big unanswered question about your business that you have right now? A really good place to start is go back to episode 332 where I talked about the seven must track metrics that will make you more money in 2025.

Brian: in that the first four, I talk about the core four metrics are how many marketing leads did you generate the number of people who might be a good fit, but they haven't expressed direct interest in hiring you.

Brian: So maybe it's a lead magnet you gave them. some people do free communities online. Using school or a Facebook group or something like that. how many marketing leads did you generate? The second metric is how many sales leads did you generate? AKA inquiries, people that have directly expressed interest in hiring you.

Brian: The third is how many clients did you close based on those inquiries? And the fourth is what's the average annual client value? What's one client worth to you over the next 12 months? That's the four core metrics that you track in your business that can really [00:06:00] be boiled down to how much money will you make in a year.

Brian: If you generate a hundred marketing leads, how many of those can you turn into sales leads? Can you turn five to 10 of those into sales leads of the five to 10 sell leads you get or inquiries you get? Can you turn two to five of those into clients? Are the clients worth two to 5, 000 each? If so, you have a good business, right?

Brian: The problem is most freelancers businesses don't look like that. Most freelancers businesses do not generate new leads. Most freelancers businesses don't have the correct average annual client value for their niche or their industry. And so you have the pick of the litter here. Any of these will do.

Brian: It's most likely. in many of these cases going to be a lead generation issue for most freelancers, that's the good place to start. What's the number one big problem that you are struggling with right now in your business that if solved makes the rest of your business easier to run,

Brian: it could be, by the way, you just don't know what your metrics are. That's a question you have or a problem that you have. And so if that's your problem and you're like, I have no idea what my numbers are or my metrics are in any of these things, that's the number one problem to solve first, Because with better data, you can come to better conclusions, and with better conclusions, you can make better decisions.

Brian: that's the first step in this, again, circle, this [00:07:00] cycle that we're going to go through multiple times. Observation question, what's the problem you want to solve? Number two is research the topic area, or just research in general. What are your options for solving this problem?

Brian: There can be many ways to tackle a problem and this is where this podcast can be handed. This is where other resources that are out there like Chris does the future podcast. Wonderful resource for another view like he has a completely different view of certain areas in business. He has a lot more experience in certain areas of business than I do.

Brian: I consider myself a client acquisition expert. I think he is a wonderful systems and operator when it comes to team and numbers and metrics and pricing and all those things like he's really good at what he does. I'm really good at what I do. In between the two of us, you can learn a lot.

Brian: There's also Alex Hermosi. There's also plenty of other influencers to go to, ~or just general business resources ~when it comes to how can I solve this one problem. There's also chat GBT, not a bad place to start when it comes to brainstorming, typing in. Mr. GPT or Mrs. GPT.

Brian: I have this problem in my business. I would like you to help me brainstorm different solutions to how I could tackle this. My business looks like this. It is a web design business. I build websites for five to [00:08:00] 10, 000 just so you have contacts. What could I do? That's a form of research.

Brian: don't take it for gospel because can hallucinate. It can give you bad suggestions. But generally for brainstorming, I love chat. GPT is a good place to start somewhere. And then you can take those ideas to other areas and cross reference and listen to other resources and listen to this podcast, the other 336 episodes that we have to find potential solutions to your problem.

Brian: I'm telling you in 337 episodes. Now I've talked about every damn topic. I run out of ideas. I'm now talking about the same things in different approaches now. So something in your business, you've probably. Have the solution on this podcast or a potential solution for you in this podcast.

Brian: But one important thing to think about when it comes to problems that you're solving is what's the actual root cause of the problem? Because many times you can solve a surface level issue thinking that's going solve all the problems and you think you've solved it, but you actually haven't because the root cause was never solved.

Brian: Example could be

Brian: my average annual client value sucks. I'm not charging enough, right? you can do the five wise exercises to grunt. It's a wonderful exercise. Why? Number one is why is my [00:09:00] average annual client value so low? It's because my pricing is bad. Why? Number two, why is my pricing bad? It's because.

Brian: Every time that I talk to a client, they beat me down on pricing. Why number three is why don't you stick to your current rates? Answering that question is because I've had three sales calls in the last two months. And so I feel like I have to close every client and because of that, I'm willing to bend on my pricing in order to just land the deal because I have to close it.

Brian: And then the question is, why do you have to close it? Why do you only have three sales calls in the last three months? Because you have no marketing leads. You've done no top of mind awareness. You haven't followed up with anyone in months, right? Like all these other problems in your business that you can start to solve.

Brian: And then it becomes something else. It becomes a follow up systems issue. It becomes a lead generation issue.

Brian: is an important thing to do is the root cause analysis, the Five Eyes exercise. before you start diving in, And solving this problem that isn't really the problem, right? So that's step number two is research. So we've, observed the problem, or we have a question that we're trying to figure out, or we have a problem that we're trying to solve.

Brian: Number two, we've researched. First, is this the actual root cause? is this the thing we [00:10:00] should solve first? And then if it is, what are my potential solutions? Once you know the root cause, And you have a good idea of how you can tackle it. Number three is we get to hypothesis. What's the hypothesis here based on what you know, what's the best chance for success of all the potential solutions that we have out there.

Brian: And it may be that, Hey, my hypothesis is I have plenty of people that I'm talking to on sales calls, consult calls, whatever you want to call them. They're sales calls. I have plenty of people that I'm talking to,

Brian: but my average annual client value still isn't where I think it should be. So my hypothesis is I can raise my rates. And if I do. I will make more money per client, it'll still be better for my business. Even if I work on fewer projects overall, it'll still be better for my business. That's the hypothesis, right? Number four is test. What is the best way to actually test this? You come up with a hypothesis for this problem. Now, how can we actually test it? What number or what metric tells us whether this test was a success or a failure?

Brian: Going back to pricing example, how can we best test this pricing change? Whether it was good or bad, what's the best metric? I know in this one it's easy math. This is why I picked this one for this [00:11:00] episode. Easy math, what's my earnings per sales call. ~That's it.~

Brian: ~here's the easy math. ~I'll spell it out for you. 10 call. If you had 10 sales calls in five closed clients at your old price, when he's 2, 000 and he made 10 grand in a month. Great. Wonderful. 10 grand. Now it's the price to beat. 10 sales calls is a good amount to have in a month.

Brian: Five closed clients, 50 percent close rate. Awesome. 2, 000 per client. Okay. But 10 grand is not bad, right? But you're like, I need some of my time back. so I'm going to try to raise my rates. What's our baseline? What's our earnings per call? 10 calls, five close clients, 10, 000.

Brian: That's 1, 000 earned per call. That's our baseline that we're going to be measuring everything else against, right? Again, better data allows you to make better decisions. ~All right, so let's say we raise our rates. ~Let's say we, raise our prices up to 4, 000 now and we have a similar 10 calls in a month. You only close three of those clients, but they're at 4, 000 each. That means you made 12 grand in a month. So that's 1, 200 per call. 10 calls, 12, 000 made. 1, 200 per call. This is simplest math you can do. 12, 000 earned divided by 10 calls done equals 1, 200 earned per call.

Brian: You're like, okay, this is going great. I'm going to raise my prices again. 10 more calls. [00:12:00] 5, 000 per client is what you're trying to get now, but you only close two clients. Now we're down to a thousand dollars per call again. Still actually way better than the first one, because now to earn 10, 000, you don't have to do two clients versus the five you had before.

Brian: So you're still way better off. Time wise, but you're not quite as well off on an earnings per call, a pure revenue basis as you were when you were at 4, 000. So that might be the sweet spot in any business, there is something called price elasticity, and that is there is. A price point in which you can keep going up and it is better for your business.

Brian: Your earnings per call will keep going up and then there's a point where it snaps and it's pretty abrupt and it'll just nosedive after that point. So it's important for you to figure out where that point is in your business. That can be very difficult if you're a really low volume, high value business it can take months or a year or more to test this sort of stuff.

Brian: It's worth doing, but there may be better tests to do in your business if that's the case. But this really works well for you if you are a. Either medium volume or especially a high volume business where you have a lot of projects you're working on. There's a lot more room for testing properly test something, [00:13:00] it really does take more than 10 calls at a time.

Brian: Like you shouldn't just be basing this off of just a 10 call test. You can start to bump rates up and track that metric over time.

Brian: And let that be one of the experiments you're trying out. But that's just one example of this. Again, I'm not telling you this is the one for you to run. I'm trying to give you an example of how are we going to test this? What's the measurement we're looking at to say whether this was a success or a failure?

Brian: So that you understand how a proper test should be done in a scientific method. And that kind of leads to the question of how long do we need to gather this data? if you're looking for scientific accuracy, there's something called statistical significance, right?

Brian: And that is based on how large of a change we had in the data, how many Tests do we need to run or how many cycles of this do we need to run? the bigger the change the fewer we need to do for example in the sales calls if you had a massive change in your Call value you need to do fewer calls overall for you to say this is a statistically significant change data here. But if the change is very small, we need to do a lot more volume and tests and numbers for us to actually come to a real conclusion because there's something called false positives. And that [00:14:00] is in data where we can say that someone is a winner or a loser in something, in a test that we're doing, and then we find out that we chose the wrong one in a split test.

Brian: This is really straightforward where like on the landing page, we're trying to say version a of the landing page versus version B of the landing page. We changed the headline. We changed the button colors, whatever. And version a, it looks like the winner, but we only had a hundred page views. It was only a winner by like two extra opt ins, That's not a statistically significant change. Therefore, you'd have to run that test for a long time.

Brian: So this could get to the point where you determine there is no great way to find statistical significance here because it's going to take way too long. And if that's the case, you can make a gut decision here. Do you feel like it's a test worth doing? Can we get proper data at least? To make a gut decision.

Brian: And then based on the feeling that you had, it may be that we can't come to real statistically significant decision on what's our perfect price point before the elasticity drops off. Right. we Might not be able to come to that perfectly. However, you might say that directionally, this is where I want to go. I'm okay with not having a perfect [00:15:00] answer here, but I'm definitely okay with taking on fewer projects for the same amount of money, right? If you're taking on three projects for 10 grand instead of four projects or five projects for 10 grand, you're okay with that.

Brian: Even if your earnings per call might be slightly lower

Brian: in a perfect world, everything's statistically significant. Meaning there's enough data there to say that this is statistically the correct move. But in real business, we don't always have that luxury. So how long do we need to gather this data? And then the other big question is, how can we actually gather this data?

Brian: Do you have it stored somewhere? Is it going to be in Google analytics? Is it going to be in your Facebook ads platform? Is it in your CRM? How are you accessing this data? Because we need make sure we find what's our benchmark or our baseline over the past six, 12 months. Or however much data you have, and then how long are we running this experiment?

Brian: And then what date we're going to analyze the data again and figure out is this actually better or not? And that leads us to number five, and that's actually analyzing the data. So just kind of recap here, going back to the image that I have on the screen, we've observed our business. We've come to a conclusion.

Brian: Our problem is our average annual client value is not high enough. We've [00:16:00] researched the topic area. We've looked at all the different areas we could do things. Raise rates we could try to get clients to come back to us more often We could have another service to sell them. whatever the case is here Our hypothesis is the easiest thing to do is just raise rates now We're gonna test with an experiment and we're gonna raise our rates by 20 percent 30 percent 50 percent And our hypothesis was if we raise it by X percent Our earnings per call is going to go up or stay unchanged if it stays unchanged.

Brian: It's actually good It means we are earning the same amount of money We're just not working as much, and that's wonderful. You don't have as much fulfillment on the back end. And now we're getting to step number five, and that's analyzing the data. This is where we actually look at all the numbers to figure out What actually happened in our experiment this can and should just be simple math like I mentioned earlier subtraction multiplication division addition It can also be really complex Spreadsheets with pivot tables and custom formulas and all this complex stuff the bigger the business gets the more complex this can get

Brian: But luckily for freelancers this stuff's all pretty basic just fifth grade math is all you need

Brian: if you've done everything to this point It's not too difficult to crush the numbers here to analyze the data to look at all the numbers and [00:17:00] figure out What's going on? Is this actually an improvement or not? Has this actually solved the problem or not? And that's where we get to number six, the final step in the scientific method here.

Brian: And that is report conclusions, which sounds like what? Report conclusions. This basically means determine what the data means. What is the conclusion here? What have we figured out? Is it inconclusive? Is it like, I don't know. Maybe we need to run the experiment longer. Maybe we need to make adjustments and try it again.

Brian: Sometimes it was successful. You're done solving the problem. There's other problems to solve in your business now, right? Sometimes the test was a failure, It was just like, this didn't solve it. It didn't move the needle. ~Sometimes it's inconclusive. I don't know. ~No matter what happened in this process, you have gained something incredibly valuable.

Brian: And that is data. You have more information than you started with.

Brian: And this is where the cycle repeats itself. This is the iterative process of problem solving. This is why the scientific method exists. It's that when you run an experiment, it's not a guaranteed success. Sometimes we just learn enough to get to the next potential solution. So now it is more information.

Brian: we've determined, you know what? Raising my rates. Wasn't the right move. I think. Based on what I'm seeing that we are at the top of what we can charge in our [00:18:00] market. Great, wonderful place to be. How else can I increase my average annual client value? It might be that you decide to pivot to a different customer avatar, one with a higher price threshold that they're willing to pay a higher willingness to pay.

Brian: Maybe it's that you now have more services. You have the same client that you want to sell other services to. If your web design, maybe you need to do branding design as well. Maybe you need to do website maintenance and hosting. Maybe you need to figure out how to. Do copywriting or get a copywriting partner or whatever.

Brian: Again, the sky's the limit. There's tons of ways to increase average annual client value. Actually, matter of fact, we have an whole episode on this just a couple episodes ago, episode 335, where I talk about my favorite seven ways to make every client worth more. Those are again, seven different experiments to run. If you're trying to figure out how to do this or seven different potential experiments to run, you shouldn't do all of them,

Brian: but the problem is the same. We're still trying to very specific problem. And you just repeat. figured this out naturally after working with hundreds of clients, we have a lot of clients we work with on paid ads and paid ads is a. really interesting place to determine that this is the actual method we are doing without even realizing [00:19:00] it.

Brian: And then I realized we're actually just doing the scientific method all the time ~we have observation. Observation is we have a problem and the problem is You need to generate leads, right?~

Brian: ~I guess that other image is actually going to do here.~

Brian: ~I don't know if you can fit this in or not. Just edit this however you can, Leland. ~So we actually ended up coming up with our own kind of method for testing ads with our clients. And that is define the problem or question. What is the thing we're trying to solve here? It's generating leads, right?

Brian: the step two in the scientific method for our paid ad stuff is collaborate with a coach, work with us to actually come up with what hooks or what angles or what things we need to change to make the ads convert better. Create new ads. We usually do three at a time. So we test in batches of three, run the ads, gather the data, submit the data to the coach, and then we are just doing the exact same thing over and over again.

Brian: Define the question or problem. The problem is our click through rate is too low. Collaborate with a coach to figure out how can we increase clicker rate, create the new ads, right? And just repeat the cycle over and over and over again until we hit benchmarks that we're trying to hit. And the goal with any client we work with is at least a 5 to 1 return on ad spend.

Brian: And that is where 1 spent, 5 is out. you can go through this entire cycle in less than a week.

Brian: we're just repeating the same thing every week with clients. And I found myself explaining over and over again that we're basically following the scientific method. And not only did this [00:20:00] make the process smoother and easier, it also set expectations with clients anyone doing any problem solving that it has not solved the first test.

Brian: I even set the expectation, your first three test ads will not work. They will fail. It is only there to gather data so that we can make better decisions moving forward. Because again, with better data means better solutions.

Brian: So whatever your problem is right now, whatever big problem trying to solve the scientific method or some variation of it is a wonderful process to use to solve the problem.

Brian: If you're trying to do research right now like, for example, lead generation or client acquisition in general is a problem in your business. I want to make sure you knew that we have a free client acquisition toolkit. As you can download, just go to six figure creative. com slash toolkit. that toolkit has a ton of great resources for research when it comes to client acquisition.

Brian: If you're trying to build out your client acquisition machine, go there first as a first step for your research to start this problem solving loop. Again, that's six figure creative. com slash toolkit, a hundred percent free. It's awesome. I think I've had an ad running for this toolkit for like two and a half years now has over a million views.

Brian: And it just continues to generate [00:21:00] leads for us. So the irony of using this toolkit as a lead generation tool is not lost on me. Irony, or is it coincidence? I don't know. either way, the resource is helpful and it's proven because I have not turned that ad off in over two and a half years.

Brian: go check that out. Sixfingercreative. com slash toolkit. Download it, use it as a research tool for planning out your own problem solving ~and yeah, love to hear what you ~And I can't wait to see what you all do with it. That is it for this episode of the Six Figure Creative Podcast. I will see you all next week.

Brian: Goodbye.