The Ultimate Playbook for Risk Reversal & Guarantees That Close Clients (Without Getting Burned)

362. Risk Reversal and Guarantees

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[00:00:00]

Brian: Uh, Most people on earth will never hire you because obviously most people on earth don't know you if even exist yet. But even the people that do know you, most of those will still not hire you. And if you personally know very few people who actually need your services, then you have very limited options at this point.

Brian: If that's you, you basically just need to focus on top of funnel like tofu. How do you get more people to know that you even exist and that you have services that can be offered?

Brian: Duh. Obvious. Here's the big problem with that. Once that becomes your option, and the best way to get new clients, which is like most freelancers I've ever seen, they don't have enough people in their network to keep them booked solid, the biggest issue is now you're trying to get strangers, complete strangers to hire you.

Brian: And at that point, that's when things start falling apart.

Brian: because strangers don't give a damn about you. they're skeptical. They usually have other options, and at this point you are now fighting a major uphill battle.

Brian: if we're being honest for a second. Most people don't care about how passionate you are. They don't care about how bad you want the gig or how long you've been working at this.

Brian: What they do care about, what's actually stopping them from saying yes to you versus someone else is risk. That is it. That's usually [00:01:00] the big thing other than obviously your portfolio. Your portfolio, you have to be good enough. But there's tons of people out there who are good enough that are just as good at you or are better than you in some cases.

Brian: And there's a lot of people out there who understand this risk thing and they're worse than you and they're getting gigs because they understand risk is the thing. Risk is the key when you're trying to get strangers to hire you. Risk is it.

Brian: In the back of their heads, they're thinking, is this a waste of money? Is this a waste of time? Is this person gonna gimme what I actually want? What's in the vision in my head for this project?

Brian: What if this person goes off the derails and derails the entire project and now we're behind schedule for this entire launch we're trying to do? this episode is about turning that fear. Into your biggest sales asset,

Brian: but right now it's likely a liability because you're probably like most other

Brian: freelancers, and you are doing nothing about risk. You don't address it at all. You try to pretend like it doesn't exist. You assume your testimonials, you assume your portfolio is good enough. If my work speaks for itself.

Brian: I have great 30 page testimonials that no one's ever gonna read. or maybe if my proposals are fancy enough, I can get more people to say yes to me.

Brian: But here's the mistake. You're trying to get acomplete stranger, or even somebody who doesn't know you well. It can even be somebody in your network, somebody that was [00:02:00] referred to you, they don't know you well, you're trying to get them to say yes. trying to get them to take a leap with you without a parachute, with no guarantee that the stuff that you're going to do is gonna be what they want.

Brian: no reassurances, no Sort of what if Safety net if things don't work out the way they wanted. Yes, you can close people without worrying about this stuff, but only the hottest, warmest referrals.

Brian: And that's the biggest problem. 'cause most freelancers only ever get the hottest, warmest referrals from people that already know like, and trust them. This is also why you're never booked solid.

Brian: So if you wanna stay booked solid, you've gotta get strangers to hire you. And if you want to get strangers to hire you. You have to deal with risk,

Brian: because if you don't, here's what happens. They'll start ghosting you. You'll hear a lot of, let's circle back on this. Later on, I'll follow up with you. Let me think about it.

Brian: And you never see 'em again. And the worst part is they did want to work with you, that had just enough sway to keep them from moving forward with you. For them to say just this is too risky. Something's just not right with this.

Brian: And the worst part of all this is that they're gonna go hire somebody for this gig, and it's likely somebody that they feel more comfortable with, even if they're worse at the service than you are.

Brian: if you think about it, every time you've made a big purchase in your life, you're [00:03:00] looking for different ways to de-risk it for yourself. When you buy a car, you want a warranty. When you buy a new range or a new stove new oven, which I just bought,you want a warranty with that as well. You want some sort of assurances.

Brian: If things go sideways, if shit hits the fan and it doesn't work out the way it's supposed to, that you're gonna get your money back or it's gonna get fixed for you, that you're not the one stuck holding the bag if it all falls flat.

Brian: So why would you expect clients to act any differently? They're spending thousands, sometimes tens of thousand, sometimes up to a hundred thousand or more on a project with you, with no assurances that this is gonna work out the way they want it to.

Brian: When you're charging what is basically the price of a used or a new car, and you're not willing to put a guarantee behind that, what does that say about you? What does that say about your service? if someone tried to sell me a brand new car, if there was a manufacturer out there that sold brand new cars and had no warranty on it, it would tell you that they don't believe in their own product enough to put a guarantee behind it.

Brian: And that's where risk reversal comes in for your services. You are saying, I get it. You're about to spend 10 grand with me. I'm willing to take on some of this risk myself so that you don't have to worry about it all because I'm so confident this is such a great fit for both of us. I'm willing to do [00:04:00] that.

Brian: It is a way to build trust, and trust is what you need in order to get clients. People will not work with people they don't know, like and trust. And part of the sales and marketing process is getting them further from that complete stranger down to the point where they do know like, and trust you until you can have an enough trust built to get a yes, to get paid.

Brian: So you can have that long-term client relationship where they'll actually refer clients to you.

Brian: If you do this right, it's gonna help you stand out. It's gonna help you get more strangers to say yes. It's gonna help you get more of those maybes into Hell's Yeses, and it's gonna speed up your sales process. So it doesn't take so long to go from someone on first contact who's interested in working with you to weeks or months later, finally saying, yes, I can go forward with this because I've done enough due diligence.

Brian: That is the topic of today's podcast. If you've never heard of the show before, if this is your first time here, you're brand new. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative Podcast. We've been around for 362 episodes now. It's a lot of episodes.

Brian: This podcast takes tons of influences from a bunch of different industries, a bunch of different sub niches, from web designers, to graphic designers, to brand designers, to music producers, to mix engineers, to master engineers, to videographers, to composers to.

Brian: [00:05:00] Colorists. And that's just the freelancers that,we work with. And we also take a ton of influence from the SaaS industry and from the internet marketing world and from everywhere else that I can find some sort of influencers to bring forward to freelancers for you to utilize as a tool in order to make your business better.

Brian: We've got 362 episodes for you to go through.and see what we've got to offer

Brian: when it comes to giving you ideas to make your business better without selling your soul. And one of those amazing ideas is the idea of risk reversal. this is one of the most challenging things for people to get their brains wrapped around when it comes to trying to implement for themselves.

Brian: Because when you think risk reversal, you now think all the risks on me as a freelancer, and I'm not willing to take on all that risk because there's a bunch of unknowns that I don't know about. And there's a bunch of stuff the client can do to make the project go bad. And today we're gonna talk about all this.

Brian: I want this to be a definitive guide for risk reversal and guarantees for freelancers. Because at this point we currently, for the coaching program that,I run as, the main business for six figure year creative, we have three guarantees for risk reversal for our own clients. And then we have 250 clients at this point.

Brian: And I've helped most of them at this point. Some of [00:06:00] 'em are still, earlier in the stages, most of them implement some sort of guarantee or risk reversal in their businesses. So I've seen this play out in a bunch of different permutations.

Brian: Not to mention the guarantees for other businesses that I have.

Brian: So lemme just explain risk reversal really quick. Ask yourself this. What the hell is actually at risk? When somebody hires you, what's at risk for them first? Every niche is different. Every industry is different. For some, they're risking money.

Brian: For others, the biggest risk isn't actually money. time instead of money,

Brian: It could also be creative vision. Some people are just more focused on the, craft that they're doing. So in B2B, this is not usually the case. It's usually in something like music production where, music producers working very closely with a musician or an artist or a band. And in that world, obviously money's at risk and the bands feel that.

Brian: but the truth thing is. Is it going to match the vision the artist has for their own work? And yes, a lot of bands can be money conscious, but they are actually willing to pay more for something they are confident about actually matching their vision, they're confident they're gonna be happy with.

Brian: So ultimately risk reversal is coming up with a persuasive way of de-risking it for the client,

Brian: [00:07:00] And like I said before, this is hugely important if you start going after colder and colder. People who don't already know like, and trust you because most people on Earth, they don't know you. And when they learn that you exist, they don't care about you. They have no idea who you are.

Brian: They don't care about you and you have to get a message across really quickly and a way that makes 'em say Hmm, interesting. We'll talk about that more in this episode. So let's talk about the types of risk reversals that work. I am thinking specifically for freelancers.

Brian: There's other types that are out there

Brian: this goes without saying if this works for freelancers, also works for agencies and a lot of other different types of businesses. But the first and most obvious one is refund if there's hard money risk. A refund guarantee is something that obviously works.

Brian: and by the way, just because I say these work doesn't mean I'm telling you to use these. I wanna give you the full picture of what all works. And then this episode help you kind of shape together your own guarantee.

Brian: Because again, most frees they hear refund and they're like, hell no. I've just did all these services. I'm not about to refund somebody no matter what, and I'm not telling you to, you don't have to. And there's ways to offer a refund guarantee without tying up a bunch of your time. We'll talk about that in this episode as well.

Brian: So refund is good for money. Risk work for free is good for happiness [00:08:00] risk. That's where you're saying something like, if you're not happy with the way this turns out, I'll work for free until you're happy. Another way of positioning that is something like unlimited revisions.

Brian: The third type of riskers that works well is the Drug Dealer Method. The first one's free, right? That de-risks a couple of things. It de-risks the risk of money as well, because, they're getting a taste of it without paying for it. Therefore, they know what it's going to be like when they do pay for it.

Brian: So the risk is gone there, so they're willing to pay for it if they actually liked it. The second type of risk it de-risks against is happiness. they've tasted a sample or they've tasted some of it, or a version of it. They now know that.

Brian: They're gonna be happy with whatever they're gonna get when they start paying for it.

Brian: another guarantee that works really well is pay only. If you're happy, this works. Again, in some niches, and this is horrible for other niches. I'll talk through again, putting these all together into a, cohesive kind of risk reversal guarantee for your own business in a second.

Brian: But pay only if you're happy. So like when you approve something, then you pay another one is we deliver on time or buy x date or you pay nothing.

Brian: That de-risks, time and money as well because. You're obviously getting your money back if they don't do it on time. But the [00:09:00] big thing there is you're de-risking the time piece if somebody's really stressed out about making sure everything's on schedule. one example is I, I've seen in B2B for freelancers, you're a small cog in a larger project, so you might charge 10, $15,000 for a project.

Brian: But the whole project is maybe spending 200, 300, 500,000 a million dollars for that project. And if your one piece isn't delivered on time, they don't care about the 10,000, $15,000 they spent you, that's not the thing they care about. They care about it being delivered on time so that the rest of the project can go smoothly.

Brian: so when you put the money back guarantee on the time piece, you are basically saying, I'm so confident that I can deliver this on time, that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. And because of that, you can also be confident that we're gonna get this done on time.

Brian: And the last one I'm gonna talk about for this episode is a really high power guarantee, and that is pay for results. So pay after result, even. This works really well in like measurable performance type work. Like if you're, a web designer who does conversion focused websites, you could say if your website doesn't, convert at least x percent, you don't pay or you only pay after it converts it X [00:10:00] percent.

Brian: that's the even better guarantee.

Brian: No matter what guarantee you choose

Brian: what matters just as much as that guarantee is how you frame it.

Brian: And what I mean is this, I'll just take the refund guarantee. if you're not happy with how this turns out, I'll give you a full refund. Why are you offering this guarantee? Think through it. Why are you offering this guarantee? A lot of freelancers have this fear that they're gonna come across as weak or desperate.

Brian: they're so desperate. They're willing to work for free, that to get gigs right. And that's not at all what it is. that's what it is, it can come across as weak and desperate.

Brian: But if it's properly framed, meaning you're talking about it in a way that conveys the correct meaning, it could be way more powerful. you're basically saying, I'm so confident that you'll love this, that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.

Brian: And you can even position it against saying most freelancers are not even close to willing to do this because they can't confidently say that they can get something that you're happy with. I'm not telling you to go out there and call out other freelancers and say my guarantee's better than theirs and I'm better than them.

Brian: That's not what I'm saying, but I'm just saying if you position this correctly, it can come from a place of power, and not a place of weak neediness.

Brian: Another great way you can frame this is I never want my clients to be unhappy. [00:11:00] and that's why I'm willing to offer a full refund. If you're unhappy for any reason

Brian: Or, and that's why I'm willing to work for free until you are happy. Something like that. But all this to say, I want you to think about the psychology of this before you start diving in and putting together a guarantee. Your offers.What is the psychology behind what you're doing? What's in it for them?

Brian: What makes this. An easier yes for them, or better yet, a no-brainer yes for them. And then think through why am I offering this or why are you offering this?

Brian: And there's usually two reasons. There's the internal reason. it could be that you're trying to reduce lead costs, you're trying to increase your close rates. You're just trying to get more clients. That's the internal reason. And there's just the external reason of why you're doing this.

Brian: It's like you're confident you can give them what they want. You don't wanna have unhappy clients.

Brian: You are so confident you can get this done on time. You know, You can get the result of the client once, et cetera,

Brian: but I wanna talk you through my favorite way to do guarantees risk reversals. For pretty much every client we work with, this is how we do it ourselves.

Brian: And I just call them internal. We call these like milestone guarantees

Brian: I'll talk through in our own business how this looks and then I'll tie it into some of our own client's businesses. So you can kind of see like in different areas what this [00:12:00] looks like. But a milestone guarantee is essentially this. It's where you say, I guarantee this thing. And it could be something that's like a full refund, right?

Brian: We actually have a full refund guarantee on our coaching offer, but we can't coach somebody for a full year and then say, Hey, we'll refund you. We put a milestone on it. a milestone is basically saying, once we cross this milestone, you're no longer eligible for that guarantee.

Brian: And that de-risks it for both parties. It de-risks it for the client because they get to at least that milestone. And they can decide do they wanna move forward or not. And it de-risks it for us because once they get past that point, we don't have to worry about somebody backing out at that point.

Brian: And so just to give you a better picture here, for our coaching program, we call it your continuous clients marketing roadmap. When we bring a client on, we create their entire marketing roadmap. We pitch it to them, and then at that point they decide do they wanna move forward or not?

Brian: If they don't wanna move forward, that's where the refund comes in. I looked at the numbers before this episode. We have had 66 in a row approved since our last rejected roadmap. But we have a ton of our clients saying that this was the thing that got them in the program in the first place.

Brian: Because there's so much uncertainty when you join a program like this, [00:13:00] especially if you've joined one before and you've seen the garbage that is out there.

Brian: And just to give you more raw numbers, of the last 200 roadmaps we sent out, 194 of them have been approved. So this is insanely effective for us and it also de-risks it for us and aligns our incentives. So I'll tell you how this guarantee works and why it works so well is because. the person you, the potential client, or the client who just joined.

Brian: They're getting to see the full picture of all the stuff we're gonna do with them, specifically for their business pitch to them from an individual, talking through them for like an over an hour or sometimes around an hour, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more

Brian: Tucking through every single detail of that plan so that they fully understand all the stuff that needs to be done in their business. before we're done, right. and the clients get excited about this because they finally say, oh, this is what I am missing. And so that's why they always approve it and very rarely do

Brian: They reject it and it's easy for the clients to say yes to because they're not locked in and working with us until after that and even after they approve it. We're still just a month to month coaching program. So that's another kind of risk thing is like your payment structure, not having contracts in place.

Brian: We de-risk it a lot by just putting a month to month thing in place, But [00:14:00] anyways, back to you. So let's talk about how this plays out in other niches. Milestones again, are wonderful. So for brand design, I was, looking through our community post and I found, a few different.

Brian: Conversations about guarantees and different niches. One was brand design. One of her clients she has a walkaway guarantee. the way she basically does it, is she presents a strategy to them and they can walk away and they don't have to pay anything.

Brian: Her name's Alina. I'm just gonna read it. The post here. She says, my process is pretty standard. I do discovery call, then I create the strategy for them. Then I do all the design work. I give my clients a strategy deck slash mood board during that middle phase that strategy phase, and I decided to try offering that same guarantee that got me to sign up for this coaching program, which is basically, if you don't like your strategy deck, I'll work with you until you're happy with it, or I'll give back your deposit if you don't wanna move forward.

Brian: And then she just went on to say, this is self-serving here for me. But she says, the roadmap guarantee is actually what sold me into this program. So I figured why not try it myself, but I'm curious, is anyone else here doing something similar? Would you recommend doing something else in the design space?

Brian: then we had another client, Allie respond. She says, I do a walkaway guarantee after the brand design strategy portion. For me, I do onboarding slash questionnaire, then the brand [00:15:00] strategy, then move to the mood board, she says, I discuss a brand strategy presentation on a discovery call.

Brian: So the guarantee comes into play in that second step. So in other words, if they don't like the strategy we discuss, then we can get their money back and walk away. So that exact same type of guarantee that I'm doing works really well in the, design space. This brand design specifically.

Brian: But you could do the same thing in web design. You could say after the wire frame or after, be, before we move forward into like deep work, the hard stuff, the actually doing the work. Find some sort of intermediate step that the milestone that says, once we get to this point, you should have a really good idea of what it's like to work with me and what we're gonna work on together.

Brian: And it's preferably something they're really excited about. They're like, oh, I see the vision of this. I see what we're gonna work on together. I'm so excited. Boom, approved, signed off. We use a proposal process where somebody actually like. Signs it and says they approve it. In our process, I recommend you do something similar where it's like, it's just basically them planting the flag on the ground saying, yes, I approve.

Brian: I'm gonna move forward with you. I'm excited to move forward. And you have just a record of them approving that as well.

Brian: in the videography niche, we have a client named Mike. He says uh, I filmed videos specifically for bands, and my risk reversal is quote, if you don't absolutely [00:16:00] love your video, we'll reshoot it for free. And this guarantee, if you. Listen carefully. It's really cleverly,worded.

Brian: basically saying, I'll work with you for free until you're happy. It's a guarantee against not getting the vision that you had. And like I said, in the musician space, that's really common. It's like I have a certain vision for how I want it to look, how I want it to feel, or how I want it to sound if you're recording music.

Brian: And so instead of him saying, I'll just work for you for free, and until you're happy with it, he positioned it in a really cool way where it's like, I'll just rerecord the whole video. We'll do it all from scratch again, if you're unhappy.

Brian: and then he goes on to basically say, I'm summarizing a couple things just for brevity here. He just says, I had some discussions, some conversations with past clients, and I noticed some patterns in these discussions. He said, for example, I've had a few bands tell me that their past videos haven't turned out as good as they hoped for.

Brian: For one reason or another, which ties directly to the risk reversal. So think through, again, conversations with your clients. What were they unhappy about in the past, and can you tie a guarantee or risk reversal with that specific thing that they struggled with in the past that they weren't unhappy with, or that was again, the core risk.

Brian: The risk in this case was the video doesn't turn out the way they want it to. so he puts a risk reversal guarantee together that says, [00:17:00] if you're unhappy, I'll just reshoot it for free.

Brian: will share one more here, I thought was clever. This is three different discussions in our community. This is a music composition. This is a, uh, conversation between a music composer and a film director. So if you don't know the process, music composer will compose music for a film and a film director's the one generally, again, I don't fully understand like the film industry, but from what I generally understand the film director is the one who's going to decide what music is being used, where and how it's used, and the work with the music composer to get all that squared away.

Brian: So lemme summarize this post, the composer's trying to sharpen his guarantee and then according to the director, he says, offering limited revisions isn't helpful because he's not a musician At a certain point, he's unable to communicate why something's not working.

Brian: So essentially the composer can't just do the like, Hey, if you're unhappy, I'll work with you for free until you're happy. Because this director has been in the experience before where he just can't communicate. He can't verbally or written word communicate why the music is not working. So he's just beating his head against the wall trying to get the music to work correctly.

Brian: it's just not something that's appealing to him.

Brian: And so the composer was trying a different approach. He's like, I'll do, I'll do a milestone guarantee. He says,[00:18:00] The milestone was difficult because we tried the demo approach. He says, I'll deliver a demo in 24 hours. But then I realized they don't want demo, they want the final piece, and I'm too old to work on spec.

Brian: He says, if I'm being honest, meaning basically. He can't just do a, short milestone guarantee for this either. So like what does he do in this scenario? John, one of our other clients who's also a composer, he shared something that he's doing is working really well. He says, I reframe the demo as this, and this is where I'm talking about the framing of the guarantee matters so much.

Brian: He says, instead of offer, a demo upfront, he says,I will score an entire scene upfront for free before they sign or commit. So basically

Brian: he's giving them the risk of it not sounding the way they want in their head. And it's a relatively small amount of time on this composer's side of things because he's able to formulate a song, compose it for the.director and the director can hear. How does this sound in the specific scene?

Brian: It's essentially saying the first one's free. This is actually the drug dealer approach actually. And this is a good deal for John because as a composer, he can then land the, bigger project. If the, director's happy with him. He at least gets his name in the hat. He gets to like actually be [00:19:00] considered for this film.

Brian: And then John goes on to share this. He says, let's remember that at the top tier of the film scoring industry, you'll see composers writing entire suites and recording them with live orchestras out of their own pocket as an audition and pitch for the film. Composers go all out just to win a film that's easy to see whenbudgets are there, because I don't know what a budget would be for scoring an entire film, but if it costs me $15,000 to do all this work and pitch the film, but I'm getting paid a million dollars out of it.

Brian: it's just a tiny percentage of the project. I can go pitch 10 films and still come out 10 to one.

Brian: But it says it's easy to see when budgets are there, but I like thinking about it, what is relevant for me, for my space in this indie space. And then the director goes back and just says, totally love the scoring the scene upfront. That would hook me good. So again, getting realtime feedback here is really interesting.

Brian: So I really like seeing these real life examples of different clients using guarantees and talking about the struggles within their niche, because it really can be a struggle.

Brian: It can be really difficult to figure out what's the guarantee, what's the hook? How do I position this, how do I frame it correctly? And then how do I de-risk it? We'll talk about de-risking [00:20:00] it in a minute.

Brian: before I get into de-risking it, I wanna talk about multi-part guarantees. Multi-part guarantees are a really good way of addressing all the risk in a project, because earlier I went through, the different types of guarantees that work really well for freelancers. And they address kind of different things.

Brian: They can address money, they can address time they can address. Uncertainty or, not getting what I want out of it.

Brian: And the best guarantee addresses the biggest risk, obviously.

Brian: there's more to think through with this Obviously the more risk you deal with, the better off you're gonna be long term, but not all risk is created equally, and it also doesn't come up in the same places. Example, some risk is really good on the front end when people are just learning about your service.

Brian: Other guarantees and risk come up during the sales process and need to be addressed before you can close the client. So we do a three part guarantee with our coaching program because of this exact thing.

Brian: But we also have a, client who's a videographer who has,two different guarantees for two different reasons. I want to explain this to you so you have this, solidified in a real business for yourself that's another freelancer. And you can, again, try to [00:21:00] come up with multiple guarantees or multiple risk reversals for you specifically.

Brian: So just for some context, this is a video for a client name's Michael. He does testimonial videos for like larger businesses. This is a B2B offer. Think about it, it's like fancy videos. He'll go in, he will like set up shop he'll interview in a really high quality like cinematic setting, testimonial videos to be using commercials or on websites or in ads or other sort of marketing collateral.

Brian: And so there's two risks associated with this offer. The first one is not finding the right avatar.

Brian: So if you think about this, if he's working with a business and they just can't find the right avatar to interview for these testimonial videos. Then the project just falls apart, right? That's a risk. However, this is not something to lead with. This is not something you're gonna put on the front end of an ad or the front end of some sort of marketing thing, or even on your website as a thing to bring up.

Brian: Because at that point, it's not even the back of the, client's head. They're just like, oh I, I know I need some testimonials or some new case studies, or, I want a high quality video for this. I'm gonna hit this guy up. This comes up in the sales process. I wanna read from you a post that he had here.

Brian: He said uh, finding the right customers to feature in the testimonial [00:22:00] videos. Is one of the biggest risks. This really ties into the risk reversal I had in mind. He says, but usually what happens is this, during the sales call, I give them some tips and then they want to find the right customer before moving forward with the project.

Brian: 'cause he's giving 'em tips on here's the criteria for the right type of customer on the call. So either they already have someone in mind or after the conversation, they get a clear idea and prefer to reach out themselves, which makes sense 'cause they got the closest relationship with their clients.

Brian: so the way he's reversing the risk on this is he will refund the project if they can't identify the correct avatar for this. So if you think about this, if that's the guarantee, how do you even position that on the front end? Just to put in dumb blunt terms, hi, I'm Michael.

Brian: I will create testimonial videos for your business, but if we can't find the right avatar, you don't have to pay me It doesn't really gel well. 'cause it,there's more to discuss and explain as to what that even means. When I first saw that guarantee I, I was like, what does this even mean? But after reading through this post and realizing, oh, it's a sales objection, it's basically a sales risk that's gonna come up during the sales conversation when you start talking about the ideal clients.

Brian: So if I'm Michael in this scenario, I'm not giving tips on the call. I'm not gonna [00:23:00] tell about the, all the things that the correct avatar needs to have on that sales call.

Brian: I'm making that the first step in my process. So Mr. Big business owner, Here's the steps of our process. The first thing we do is we identify the avatar, get the right exact perfect fit person that represents the right avatar person to get you the most clients and customers for your business.

Brian: Mr. Business owner, Mrs. Business owner, and I have a four stage process we have for identifying and, getting the right people, in the seat for the interview videos, so that's part one. And then you go on and explain part four or three or whatever your stages or phases are of, of your project.

Brian: And then Mr. And Mrs. Business owner says, great, but what if we can't find the right person to interview? I don't know of anyone that makes the right sense for us. That's why I have this guarantee, Mr. And Mrs. Business owner. If we don't find the right avatar, then I'll give you a full refund. But I'm confident I have not yet found a, any business that we couldn't find the right fit person, that everyone was happy and excited to interview that everyone signed off with at the end.

Brian: So that is a sales type risk reversal type thing that only comes up in the sales conversation. And therefore, all of your risk reversals do not have [00:24:00] to be talked about on your website. They don't have to be talked about and thrown about everywhere using your marketing, especially on front end, that can be saved to close more calls.

Brian: And that's where, again, risk reversal number two comes in for him because he still needs something on the front end to hook people in, to get strangers to say, interesting. I'll have a conversation with Michael to see if this is right for my business and in this case, because he is working with businesses, risk number two is not money.

Brian: It's time.

Brian: They're worried about the whole thing being too complex or taking too long.

Brian: Here's what Michael says. He says, what I can guarantee here is this. From day one of shooting, they'll have the main video and all of the short social clips within a week from first call to final delivery in two weeks, is very doable for me, the only thing that's hard to predict is the availability of the customer will be interviewing, and this is where we start diving a little bit into de-risking you get for yourself.

Brian: You can't have a guarantee that's like we'll get done in two weeks no matter what. When you have no control over when the person's gonna be available for the interview. So you have to have things in place to de-risk it for you. And his is, it'll be delivered within two weeks of the first interview.

Brian: So that means if it takes four weeks, five weeks, eight weeks, four, the customer to be [00:25:00] interviewed, then. That's not on me as the freelancer. It's on the business and the customer and all that stuff to be organized and the schedule to the line. But when that interview happens, I'm delivering within two weeks.

Brian: So, Another way of de-risking this, or a maybe even a third guarantee here for him might be, putting a guarantee on how much time the business owner has to be involved with this.

Brian: If they're really pressed for time, I don't have a bunch of time to invest in this.

Brian: So if you're working with him, you can say, this should not take more than five hours of your time over the next six weeks or the next two weeks, or whatever,

Brian: So let's zoom out and talk about risk here for yourself, the two biggest reasons I ever hear of why people don't implement really good guarantees and risk reversals in their businesses as freelancers. The two biggest reasons are I don't wanna appear to be desperate.

Brian: We are to talk about that you can have a good guarantee from a place of power, and honestly, a good guarantee is powerful and positions you as the more powerful, more confident, more premium option. But number two is

Brian: freelancers don't want to take on the risk yourself. You are just as risk averse as the people you're trying to get to hire you. And you don't see the irony in that they don't want the risk either, and you don't want the risk. So in this scenario, who loses? It's going to be you. you're better off just taking [00:26:00] the damn risk.

Brian: And you'll get more yeses than you'll get nos, and you'll talk about numbers in a second. But even with taking on more risk, that doesn't mean you have to take on all the risk. There's something called conditional guarantees, and there's something called unconditional guarantees. Most freelancers when they hear guarantees or they see guarantees, or they try to formulate how they're gonna do a risk reversal in their own business like having a refund, they think unconditional guarantees.

Brian: And in most cases, you don't have unconditional guarantees. You have conditional guarantees. And when you have conditional guarantees, that means your client has to meet certain conditions or criteria in order to even qualify for that guarantee.

Brian: And the way you figure out which one you should use is you use unconditional guarantees when the risk is low for you or the confidence is high for you, one of the two. And you use a conditional guarantee when the risk is high for you, or the confidence is very low for you. again, just for clarity, unconditional guarantee just means, if I say, I'll work with you until you're happy or you get your money back.

Brian: If that's an unconditional guarantee, that's a horrible one because happiness is subjective and they can work with you for a very long time and then say, I'm unhappy, and then you have to gimme my money back because it was unconditional. There's no conditions involved with that. I just could say I'm unhappy [00:27:00] and I get my money back.

Brian: That's a terrible, terrible guarantee. So let's talk about some of the conditions you can have on your guarantee. I've got, three different categories of conditions. The first is project minimums.

Brian: You can say that project has to be a certain size or a certain number of units or a certain number of things in order to even qualify for a guarantee. So you can say Project minimum has to be this level project before you even qualify for this guarantee. So you can tie certain guarantees to certain project minimums.

Brian: Just to give a hard example here, one of our clients, he has a mix engineer. He has a guarantee of he will refund them if they're unhappy with the mix. But to qualify it's a three song minimum. And this does two things on a sales conversation when they are interested in this guarantee and they're like, that sounds awesome.

Brian: But they only wanna do a single, which is like, mixing engineers hate singles, compared to, 2, 3, 4 or five songs. But when you tie your guarantee to a three song minimum, they get some more people to say yes to more songs. So now you've increased your average client value, which is a very wonderful, powerful thing.

Brian: So it increases the client value and it pulls in more leads because it's an interesting, intriguing guarantee that people wanna learn more about.

Brian: Which leads me to one important note here. If you're using paid ads to promote your offer, your [00:28:00] guarantees, things like that, never try to overexplain your guarantee. Don't try to say, Hey musicians, if you need your song mixed, I'll mix it if you're unhappy, I'll refund you.

Brian: But you have to have a three song minimum in order to qualify for this guarantee. Like That's like a big old buzzkill. you don't wanna bait and switch somebody. So if you feel like it's a,bait and switch, you're welcome to explain as much as you want.

Brian: But the reason I say don't is because. Messaging matters a lot on front end ads and getting people to come in and have a real conversation and then you say, Hey, cool. If you want this guarantee, I'm happy to do it. It's gonna be a three song minimum. people are generally open to that thing. They understand it.

Brian: try to overexplain things in the ad or on a social post or somewhere else, generally all this does is bring up more questions and answers and. You just lose the meaning of the message that was trying to get people to take an action in the first place. So that's my like, just weird side advice.

Brian: Don't try to overexplain your guarantees. That's what sales conversations are for and that's what client agreements are for.

Brian: So project minimums, that's one way to put conditions to guarantees. Category number two is having avatar requirements. This could be things like. B2B, it could be that you have to be a certain [00:29:00] team size to qualify. So we have a client and realize that the best fit clients are like teams of 10 or more, businesses of 10 or more employees.

Brian: And that doesn't mean he'll say no to a client who's three or four employees, right? But if they're not as good of a fit, he doesn't wanna take that risk on. So he can say, I'm happy to do this. You just don't qualify for this guarantee. This is for businesses of 10 or more. And again, the reason for that is those businesses are usually worth more to him, so he can take on more risk there, whereas smaller businesses are basically smaller projects he's not willing to do that work and put the risk up for those.

Brian: Another example of avatar requirements could be, with music producers like certain band size. So it could be certain number of band members, could be certain number of streams on Spotify. Like how big is the band from a fan standpoint or how many members are in the band? We have clients with both of those sorts of stipulations on their guarantee for different reasons.

Brian: the last category, and the one I'm gonna talk about the most here is conditions around client expectations. In other words, what does a client need to do in order to qualify for this guarantee? So for example, if you have a guarantee that's, I know you'll be happy with this,project, and if you're unhappy for any reason, I will work with you for free until you are happy with it, right?

Brian: That could [00:30:00] lead to a long, drawn out, horrible process that lasts weeks, months, or years, right? And the way to de-risk yourself on that is the client has to respond to revisions within X days, right? Once they stop responding within X days, three days, five days, 24 hours, 48 hours, if they don't respond within that timeframe, you can get outta that guarantee.

Brian: At that point. They've broken the contract, they've broken the client agreement, and therefore no longer, required to fulfill on that side of things.

Brian: Another one for if you have like a time guarantee like has to be done in 14 days or I, give you your money back. Obviously you want conditions there for the client, like they have to send you files or do some important task within X days of the project start in order to even qualify for this guarantee.

Brian: So it's basically saying this, I'm willing put this guarantee in place and I'll do everything in my power on my side to deliver on that. But because of the things that are outside of my control, the things I have no control over, I've gotta put limits on those things.

Brian: So when you're thinking through all the stuff we've talked about in this episode and you're like I have some really good ideas for this, but I can't offer this refund guarantee, I can't offer their money back because in these sorts of projects, this can come up and that can come up, turn those into [00:31:00] conditions,sort of thing that you're just have uncertainty about.

Brian: You can turn into conditions that the person has to agree to in order to even qualify for the guarantee. I'm gonna give you all three of our guarantees and all of our conditions associated with 'em. So you have an idea what this looks like, and if you're considering this coaching program, now, you know all the conditions associated with our guarantees.

Brian: So you could be better educated before you even come in and apply for this, which is, it's a dual purpose here.

Brian: for context, our coaching program, helps people get clients. That's the easiest way to explain it. help you to, build a client acquisition system. And we have three guarantees. The first guarantee is, an unconditional guarantee we call it the roadmap guarantee, and that is where we create your full continuous clients marketing roadmap.

Brian: We pitch it to you and we will work with you for free until you're happy with it or we'll just refund it. And there's no, conditions associated with that. It is literally an unconditional guarantee. If you request a refund anywhere, at any point before approving that roadmap, we'll refund it to you.

Brian: And if we're wondering what the refund is, it,we have an onboarding fee associated with, coaching. So that's guarantee one. It's unconditional and that gets a lot of people over the fence to say, I'll, at I at least wanna see what this roadmap has in it. And

Brian: 194 of [00:32:00] our last 200 roadmaps have been approved, and the last 66 in a row have been approved. The reason that we do that is because that's a high confidence guarantee for us. We can put unconditional because we have high confidence,

Brian: not because it's low risk. It's a lot of work on our end. Guarantee number two is we have something called the a hundred leads guarantee, and it basically says if we can't get you a hundred leads, at least a hundred leads from the stuff we implement. We'll give you a full refund and that one is conditional because obviously have to do stuff in order to generate leads.

Brian: you can't just say we couldn't get you leads because you didn't do anything right. You could also lie about it. So we have a few conditions. The first condition is you have to use our software. We use a white labeled go high level, CRM and email marketing software, and we give it to all of our clients.

Brian: It's a free tool that they can use. and. Your list has to be hosted on there in order to qualify for that guarantee, so we can actually see how many leads you've generated. number two is you have to obviously follow our stuff. And if you're not doing it, then we can't guarantee it if you're not doing it.

Brian: And number three is you have to spend the 500 ad budget we give you. So we give you a 500 ad budget. You have to spend that. And if after all that you haven't generated a hundred leads, we will refund you. To this date, we have not had to refund a single person with that [00:33:00] guarantee. So that one is a,conditional, but it is also low risk because when people do those things, they get at least a hundred leads.

Brian: And the third guarantee that we have is the ROI guarantee. Basically saying that if you don't get at least $10,000 worth of new clients that you would not have otherwise gotten without our help, if you wouldn't gotten at least 10 k worth of new work, we will work with you for free until you do.

Brian: And this one we have delivered on, but this one is conditional as well. we're not gonna just continue to coach people for free if they're not doing the conditions involved with this. So the conditions are this, follow our stuff. Don't ghost us for more than three weeks. We understand life gets in the way stuff happens.

Brian: You might disappear for a couple weeks, you come back, great. You can be gone for a month for vacation or something. But either way, it's just don't go for more than three weeks.

Brian: And then finish your roadmap. If you've done all those things, then you should get an ROI if you work with us and if you don't get an ROI on this, you don't get at least 10 K of new clients, then we will work with you for free until we do, we have service. A good number of people on that.

Brian: And we've gotten a lot of people off of that guarantee as well. Meaning we've gotten them ROI and we've gotten some that are just really tough cookies to crack. But I'd say within 250 plus clients we've served with this, we're doing pretty good with that guarantee. But the important [00:34:00] part is we actually do deliver on it.

Brian: And that's the other side of, of this for you is if you have a guarantee, like you'll work for free until they do, no matter how much it sucks for you, you've gotta deliver on that because at the end of the day. It is about getting more yeses than nos. So for example, yes, we are working for free for a number of clients right now.

Brian: We're not getting paid for that. And yes, we have had to refund some roadmaps even though we put a ton of work and effort into it. But these guarantees have brought us in many, many, many more clients than we otherwise would have. If we put all the risk on you, you gotta pay us and you just gotta trust that it's gonna work.

Brian: ' cause we have no risk. So we have felt the pain of these guarantees. We have felt the pain of refunding people. We have felt the pain of having to work for free. However, we continue to do it and we will not stop because it is a net positive for everybody involved. and that is the way your guarantees should be.

Brian: That's the way your risk reversal should be. It should be a win-win for both parties. So that is all I got for you today. If you want to join the coaching program, obviously I just talked about the guarantees. Obviously we can help you if you are a freelancer, you need more clients, you need consistency, you're doing the feast or [00:35:00] famine life.

Brian: You can just go to six figure creative.com/coaching. Fill out the short questionnaire there, and uh, we'll be in touch. See you next week on the six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace.