These 13 Counterintuitive Truths About Freelancing Will Change How You Work

352. 13 Counterintuitive Truths

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Brian: [00:00:00] a lot of freelancers feel like they know the basics of how to run their business, but the problem is a lot of those basic assumptions are wrong. For example, let me know if any of these things are things that you've thought of for your own business recently that you should be doing. Maybe you thought I need to get more clients or I need to work more so that I can make more money or I need to get better at my craft so I can attract higher quality clients or Freelancing is very unstable.

Brian: Maybe I should focus on passive income or something like that in order to stabilize my income diversification, right? or one of my favorites, I need to send out that proposal ASAP.

Brian: ever thought about those things for yourself, they may be a hundred percent wrong for you. So today I'm diving into the 13 most counterintuitive truths about freelancing. some of these might either surprise you or even make you rethink how you're actually running your business.

Brian: if this is your first time listening to the podcast, hi, I'm Brian Hood.

Brian: This is the six figure creative podcast. This podcast is for creatives who want to earn more without selling their souls. And the way we help you earn more in this podcast specifically is we take a lot of influences from outside industries and outside people and bring them into this [00:01:00] industry. Because I've learned long, long ago the best marketers are not freelancers.

Brian: The best systems and automation people are not freelancers. The best pricing and packaging people are not freelancers. The best differentiation, the best, messaging people are not freelancers. With the exception of maybe copywriters.

Brian: Copywriters get messaging pretty well. But you get what I'm saying here. There's a lot of skills that goes into being a good freelancer. A well rounded freelancer, or what we call a full stack freelancer, and in the show I try to bring outside influences in here to tell us what we're doing wrong. Oh, especially sales.

Brian: Sales is another one of those.

Brian: but in this episode, we're going to explore the 13 counterintuitive truths, things that sound good on the outside, but they're actually counterintuitive. things that may not make sense at first, but I'll explain each of these in turn I think the last two are, ones that I've seen most recently. And are things I think every freelancer on earth need to hear. So number one, let's start with number one today. first counterintuitive truth is you don't need more clients. You need better clients. We regularly work with clients who come to us to help them with client acquisition, who unsurprisingly want more clients.

Brian: And there's nothing wrong with wanting more clients necessarily. But in a lot of cases, [00:02:00] you don't need more clients. You need better clients. And so with a lot of these freelancers, they'll come to us like there's one that we're working with right now. He's worked with like 58 clients over the past 12 months.

Brian: It's a lot of clients. time after time. People come to us. And they've worked with a good amount of clients over the last 12 months, but they're working 40 to 50 hours a week. They're making 50 to 100, 000 a year. They want to get to say a quarter of a million a year, 250, 000 a year.

Brian: That's their goal. But the math doesn't compute. How do you go from 50 to 100, 000 a year up to a quarter of a million dollars a year? How do you more than double your income when you're already working 40 to 50 hours a week? Now there's plenty of stuff on the systems and processes and fulfillment and that whole side of things that can help alleviate some of that.

Brian: But the truth is you don't need more clients, more projects, you need fewer clients, fewer projects at a higher value.

Brian: So instead of constantly going after more and more and more and more clients thinking that if I just get more clients, I'm going to make more money. Instead, focus on getting fewer, higher value clients, retaining them for a long time so they come back to you again and again and again and again, whether it's recurring or reoccurring work

Brian: and find the clients that actually value the work that you do.

Brian: And sometimes it [00:03:00] takes a ton of work to do this, which the work is worth it. And sometimes this is just as simple as raising your rates. Many people don't understand supply and demand and pricing. When your demand goes up and your time goes down, your price has to go up to accommodate for that. You have fewer supplies of hours.

Brian: have less supply of time, more client demand. So your prices have to go up So that's the first counterintuitive truth. It's not more clients, it's better clients. Higher paying clients.

Brian: And this leads us to number two. And it's kind in line with this first counterintuitive truth is you don't have to work more hours to make more money. This is something that freelancers are really bad at doing is separating their brain from time and money. You're not being paid for time, you're being paid for some sort of outcome or some sort of result.

Brian: and unsurprisingly again and again and again and again, the most successful freelancers that I work with. are the people who charge for the results that they give their clients, not necessarily the time that goes into that.

Brian: And the best ones are the ones who have put such a good process together. They streamlined it so well that they can systematically deliver the results of the client for less and less time on their end. So that's usually a product high service, something with a retainer, but anything that [00:04:00] makes a disproportional amount of value based on the amount of time that you spent on it.

Brian: this is a lesson. I learned back in 2014 where I was doing this kind of work where a lot of feelings are where every project looks different. Everything is so unique and so different. There's a lot of like little things you have to do for every single client.

Brian: Very hard to systemize, very hard to productize. And so it's very hard to detach your time from everything. Your income in that regard, especially when you're working closer with a client. So in my world, it was music production. I was in the studio with the bands recording them. And so it's a lot of like moving parts, a lot of like interfacing directly with clients and every project unsurprisingly looked vastly different from the last.

Brian: So it was really hard to create a good flow, a good like production system. To get people from, start to finish in an efficient way. So I was literally just charging per day at the time. So literally in order more money, I had to charge more at the time. 2015 I made the shift where I stopped recording bands and I just did mixing and mastering.

Brian: And for those who don't know, mixing and mastering is just where you make the song sound good that were recorded in another studio. So I didn't have to record or produce the bands anymore. I didn't have to work directly with the clients, interfacing them face to [00:05:00] face. I just got file sent to me.

Brian: I did my creative thing and I made him sound amazing and that I was able to turn into a much more productized service with a lot of help with templates with automations with, help from assistant to do a lot of the non creative tasks and that I was able to. Bring my income up to over 300 bucks an hour instead of 300 a day.

Brian: It was like 300 an hour,

Brian: But that was the first and definitely the last time that I learned how to separate my time from dollars.

Brian: So in a lot of cases, if you are stuck in a place where the way you do your rates, the way you get paid is based on how many hours or how many days you work. That is the first way to fix this is by detaching the outcome you, provide. Which in my case was music production or music mixing.

Brian: The bands want the songs to sound good. That's the easiest way to say it in layman's terms. I was able to separate that outcome from the amount of time I spent with them. So I could spend fewer hours providing that same outcome with the client and disproportionately increase my income.

Brian: And this naturally leads into unconventional truth number three.

Brian: Working fewer hours can make you more money. Now, obviously you have to have already detached. Your time from your dollars in order for this truth [00:06:00] to be actual truth and not a lie, right to work fewer hours and make more money. Those two things have to be separated your dollars and your hours. That's not all though, because as creatives, when we work more and we hit this burnout point, we are now less creative.

Brian: Because we're working all the time, we start to resent our clients. We start to be able to make fewer good decisions or fewer good outcomes for our clients because we're overworked.

Brian: And by the way, this can happen whether or not we've separated time from dollars. So like that first step I just talked about in Unconditional Truth number two. Is you don't have to work more to make more. We also don't want to work more whether or not we separated those two things. Because I also did that.

Brian: I separated my dollars from hours. I was making 300 bucks an hour and I still work myself too much where I was taking on too many projects because Mr. Business Man Brian over here wanted to make more money. And I still overwork myself and then. I ended up burning myself out in 2017, I went to Thailand for five weeks.

Brian: I didn't work at all. And then when I came home, it took three months to recover from that because I lost so much momentum in my life and my business. So I learned a hard lesson then.

Brian: Awesome trip though. [00:07:00] Would recommend.

Brian: But when we, tap out all of our creativity and it's just gone and we're drained. How can we possibly sell creativity as a service? Because that's what we're ultimately doing here as creatives.

Brian: It comes down to focusing on high value tasks, which means all of those things that are non creative tasks, all the admin work, all of the invoicing, all that crap that like, any human could do or any system could set up and automate. All that stuff's got to go on the high value stuff and then also setting boundaries with clients where clients don't dictate your work hours, don't dictate when you do things.

Brian: Obviously you want to keep a good relationship there. You don't want to be toxic or anything, but having boundaries in place to keep your toxic clients from overruling your boundaries keeps you in a good sane place so that you can be maximum creative, right? Because we are paid for our creativity, so we've got to protect that at all costs.

Brian: So that was just a number four and that is you don't have to be the best. You just have to be the most visible. Think about that. You don't have to be the best at what you do. You just have to be the most visible. I've seen this countless times, like in my over a decade of freelancing, plus just being in business in general for the last 15, 16 years.

Brian: Now I'm on my 16th [00:08:00] year as an entrepreneur. I have not had a day job in over 16 years. January, 2009 was my first year as a freelancer or first month

Brian: I've seen time and time and time again. Someone who is not considered the best getting the gig to my world, a producer who's not the best. They're good, but they're not the best. I've even seen cases where producers that are mediocre get the gig, not because that they're the best.

Brian: but because they're more visible than the best option,

Brian: Being good at your craft is a good starting place, but that's not it. takes a lot more than that. There's a reason there's a sign behind me that says it takes more than passion. passion is what leads us to getting good at our craft, but it takes way more than that.

Brian: So many talented freelancers struggle, not because they're bad at their craft, but because they've neglected every other skill that goes into running a business. The day you decided to charge for your services is the day you became a business owner and as a business owner, all of a sudden, all these other responsibilities and roles just appear out of thin air sales.

Brian: Marketing, delegation, systems, processes, communication,

Brian: all the things that we put into what we call that again, the full stack freelancer, which we have a series on the podcast called the full stack freelancers, two episodes go back to [00:09:00] episode

Brian: 235 and 236. The episode title is why you don't need to be a better creative in 2023. So it's an old episode, but still relevant here. So full stack pre answer part one. And then. The next episode of that is episode 236. It's five sets of skills every freelancer should be improving. That's a part two of that episode.

Brian: So just go to six figure creative. com slash two, three, five, be a really good next step for you. If you listen to the show for the first time, or if you just have never heard those, two episodes, it just talks about all the other skills that you need as a freelancer to survive, to make this work.

Brian: And going back to my point, you don't have to be the best, just the most visible, a freelancer with a great portfolio who never markets themselves. always lose to the freelancer with a mediocre portfolio who puts themselves out there has strong marketing Understands sales skills understands positioning understands differentiation understands all the things we talked about in that series They will win

Brian: whether you like it or not being top of mind matters more than raw talent as a freelancer

Brian: Unconventional truth. Number five is if you're a freelancer, you don't need thousands of followers to get high paying clients.

Brian: a small but engaged audience of the right people will always get you more clients as a freelancer than a large audience of the wrong [00:10:00] people. I've seen so many freelancers that make content for other creatives, other freelancers just like them.

Brian: So they have thousands or tens of thousands of followers of people just like them. People who will never hire them. People who have the exact same skill set as them because they got sucked into the vanity metrics trap where they're making content that gets the most likes, the most views stuff that they want to talk about because it's fun for them.

Brian: But it doesn't actually serve you as a freelancer. There's nothing you get out of that unless you're trying to sell something to those people. Alex Ramos. He had a really good example of a seven figure business owners, a woman who does like medical coding or something. She has 6, 000 followers on Instagram and is hyper targeted.

Brian: Now I just said, you don't need thousands of followers. She has 6, 000. So that's technically thousands of followers, but she's got a seven figure business. So if you just bring that back a little bit, you need about a thousand good followers, a thousand true followers to make six figures or more as a freelancer of the right people.

Brian: You'll beat the other freelancers in your niche that are targeting other Freelancers just like them who have 10, 000 followers and they look like they're a bigger deal on Instagram Bigger deal on Tik TOK, but ultimately it doesn't matter because those are followers are never going to hire them.

Brian: So that's number five. You don't need thousands of followers to [00:11:00] get high paying clients.

Brian: Counterintuitive truth. Number six The easiest marketing strategy for freelancers is to just follow up more. That's it. Just follow up more. When's the last time you followed up with literally anybody for anything

Brian: you're waiting around for referrals to come in. You're doing nothing to generate new leads. Those referrals come in. You talk numbers, you shoot them a proposal, and then they never hire you. And then you're just waiting around for the next client. There's tons to be done to generate brand new leads all the time.

Brian: Plenty you can do, but the easiest thing to do is just follow up with those leads you already have. Those people that have already inquired about your work.

Brian: we need to get strangers to hire you at some point, right? But right now, how many inquiries, how many past clients have you not followed up with? There's tons of reasons to follow up with past clients, people who have already hired you before because they'll need your services again in the future or some other service that you offer.

Brian: There's plenty of reasons to follow up with those people that ghosted you because you've sent them the proposal and you never heard back from them. Maybe you sent one follow up. Did you know more than half of my income comes from follow ups six or greater? It means following up six times or more to get half my income.

Brian: Yet most people don't follow up even two [00:12:00] times.

Brian: If you want the world's easiest strategy on making more money as a freelancer, it's literally just follow up. Follow up until it feels so awkward. You know what? here's what I say. Follow up until they say yes, until they say no, or until one of you die.

Brian: Unconventional truth number seven, this is one of my favorites. the last two of my favorite, but this is one of my favorites. Proposals In most cases, they're a waste of time. In most cases, I don't even think you should send proposals.

Brian: There's a couple reasons why. First is the reason most freelancers send proposals is because they're hiding behind the proposal. They don't want to talk money on a sales call. And they just want to have the conversation. Cool. I'll follow up with a proposal. I'll put all the numbers in the proposal. I'm going to send you the proposal.

Brian: I'm going to hide behind it. got, I hope they say yes. And then they go to you and you don't know why. I must've been too expensive. I'll go over lower next time. That's literally the thought process of like 95 percent of freelancers.

Brian: if a client is actually serious about hiring you, they don't need a five page PDF going over all your details in order to make that decision.

Brian: Here's what the client needs is for you to just have the conversation about money with them on the call. So you can't hide the proposal. The reason I have all of the people that we work with for client acquisition and [00:13:00] sales, all of the clients that we work with, all 200 of them or so, give or take right now, they talk numbers on the call.

Brian: It's awkward as hell for them the first time they do it. But here's why it actually uncovers the real reason you're not getting hired when you talk numbers or the client You will instantly get a feel for is it because they're sticker shock. They expected something way lower Is it because you didn't do a good job of building the value of what it is?

Brian: You're selling is it because there is truly somebody out there that they're gonna work with for a lower price who offers the same result If any of those things are true, there's other things that can be done For example, if there are other freelancers out there offering the exact same thing as you for a lower price That means you're a button seat freelancer Who's been commoditized.

Brian: that's the case, there's things that you can do in your packaging and your messaging in order to differentiate yourself and stop comparing apples to apples and start selling oranges so they can't compare apples to apples anymore.

Brian: You won't figure that out unless you start talking numbers on the call with the client.

Brian: here's the counter to that. A lot of people will say well, I talk numbers on the call, but the client still wants me to send a proposal. When a client is asking for a proposal, unless it is a big business where part of their process is to [00:14:00] actually gather proposals from multiple clients or multiple freelancers or multiple contractors where they have to have multiple proposals to bid against each other.

Brian: Unless that's the case, which is like 99 percent of you, that is not the case. If it's not required for the business, like a 100 percent requirement. To get a proposal that is what we call a smoke screen. A smoke screen is just an easy, quick thing. They can throw up to smokey out, get you off the call.

Brian: So you don't have to talk about anything awkward or hard. The problem with that is you don't get to the truth of anything. So when the client comes to you, you have a good discovery call, you talk numbers on the call, and they're like, cool, sounds great.

Brian: Can you send me that in a proposal? That is a very polite way of saying, I need to think about it. And when people say, I need to think about it, all they're saying is, I am uncertain. And there's a reason they're uncertain, but you don't know what that reason is because you got to ask. the way to come over this is, and I've talked about this in the past episode, I think it was

Brian: episode three 50, actually what 1600 sales calls taught me about closing complete strangers is like seven laws for sales. One of those is actually overcoming objections. I talk about this in that episode, but it's basically this. If they ask for a proposal, they say, great, no problem at [00:15:00] all. Just out of curiosity, what do you need to see in the proposal?

Brian: To make you feel comfortable moving forward. What do you need a proposal for? I can send it. reason I'm asking you, Mr. Potential Client, Sir, is because I found that the proposals are a waste of time most of the time.

Brian: Because we've talked over all these things. And I'm happy to send all the details we've talked over. But a proposal is a lot of work to put together. And frankly, I've stopped doing them because most clients don't need them. That will get a real honest answer out of the client. It could be, I'm just trying to gather prices.

Brian: Okay. If it's gathering prices, sweet. I know how to follow up with that client. I know I can book a follow up call after they've talked to other freelancers and we can talk numbers about the other freelancers and how we compare to those. But at the end of the day. If you're just sitting up proposals because you're scared to talk numbers or because clients are requesting them because they don't want to make a decision on the call, which is completely fine.

Brian: You're still not getting to the truth, which is why are they not hiring you? And if you can't figure out why they're not hiring you, you're not learning anything in order to improve yourself. so that is counterintuitive truth. Number seven proposals are almost always a waste of time

Brian: and most of my clients don't send them.

Brian: counterintuitive truth number eight, clients don't always know what they need. [00:16:00] whether it's proposal, are you doing sales calls? Are you doing all your sales through emails? The client will ask for something from you. They'll say, Hey, Mr. Freelancer or Mrs. Freelancer, can I get this thing from you?

Brian: And preferably you're doing this on a sales call or discovery call, whatever you want to call it, because it allows you to dig into what they truly need versus what they think they need. and this is very niche dependent. It depends on how productized your service is versus how customized things are.

Brian: This is very much not a blanket answer for everyone, but many times they'll come to you thinking they need one thing, but they need something completely different. An example for like web designers is they want a website, right? the problem is all their branding sucks.

Brian: So you're going to make a beautiful website with horrible branding. All their font choices are terrible. The colors are awful. Their logo is dog shit. And yet what they truly need is a better brand for the website. That's just one easy example, but if you actually take that further, you realize they just need more customers, right?

Brian: The business needs more customers. And the reason they don't have customers is because they have a bad website with a bad brand

Brian: and they likely don't have a lot of the backend taken care of either. They don't have. Automated follow ups when people opt in, they probably don't even have a way for the person to opt in to get on the email list on the first [00:17:00] time. They likely don't have anything on the back end to actually send people to those email lists.

Brian: As a web designer, your job is to not just give them what they think they want, it's to give them what they truly need to get the outcome that they want.

Brian: And every time you add something on to get them closer to what they actually truly need, then it adds additional value and fortunately that's lucrative for you because the more value you add to your clients, the more you can charge for that, because earlier we talked about this separating your time from value, right?

Brian: When you provide more value, it doesn't necessarily take more time. Oftentimes, when you truly dissect what they need and put together a full package, a solution that's going to solve that problem, you can charge so much more Then saying, yes, sir. Mr. Business owner.

Brian: I can definitely make your website for you with your awful branding and terrible backend, because here's what will happen. They will get that new, beautiful website that you created. That's not that beautiful because the branding sucks. And it doesn't actually get them closer to what their goals are. So in their brains, the thing you, they paid for didn't actually help them at all.

Brian: so counterintuitive truth. Number eight, clients don't always know what they need. It is your job to come as a consultant, not just a button seat freelancer, a true [00:18:00] consultant, somebody that can have a good conversation with to truly unpack all the things that they need, even if you can't provide them all to truly get the full picture of what it is they need so that you can.

Brian: At least be part of the conversation or the solution, if not the entire solution for them. And that brings me to counterintuitive truth number nine. Similar here to the last one, Clients aren't always right. Clients have many ideas, but they hired you, the expert.

Brian: So do not be afraid to push back at any point. If you feel that it's going to hurt the outcome of the project, I fiercely protected my work during projects, especially in world that I was in, I'm working with unsophisticated bands who are They just don't know what they don't know. they ask for things, right? I separated these into like three kind of categories. The first one was sure I can do that. No problem. Very reasonable request. Happy to do it. And that's a lot of requests. not unreasonable.

Brian: the second category of bucket is, that's a bad idea. I'm going to try to talk you out of it. Here's all the reasons that's a bad idea, but ultimately at the end of the day, it's your money. So I can do it if you want. I try to talk about it. [00:19:00] Most of the time I'm successful. Occasionally I'll say, sure, I'll do it if that's what you want.

Brian: Bucket number three is I will never do this no matter what you say or how much you pay me. It sounds harsh. Think about it this way. Thank you. People came to me because I provided something that they wanted. They liked my portfolio. They liked all the work that I've done. They trusted me to give them that same quality.

Brian: And when they ask for something that goes against that quality, that's going to hurt that in quality. I will always say no to that. And I'll explain to them. It's because you came to me because you want in my world again, you want a Brian hood mix. You want a Brian hood album. You want your music to sound like the stuff that I have on my portfolio, right?

Brian: But when you ask for something that's going to make that not happen, I'm not going to do it because not only is that you think you want this, but you don't. It also hurts my work for future clients to hear. And now my quality diminishes. So I've got to protect my reputation and also protect you guys because you hired me to get this certain result.

Brian: Now I will say this. I am headstrong. I'm a challenger. I will always push back. If I feel like it's wrong, this comes naturally to me. I have no problem with this [00:20:00] whatsoever. Everybody's not like that. I would say most people are not like that.

Brian: Hey, you don't have to come with them as strong as I would. But B, you still need to understand you've got to protect both the quality of your work and the end result for the client themselves to protect the client from their own mistakes. So counterintuitive truth number nine is the client is not always right.

Brian: Matter of fact, they're often wrong. All right. Three more to go here.

Brian: counterintuitive truth number 10 automation and templates are your secret weapon. Now, this sounds like it's not counterintuitive, but I've talked to enough creatives to know that when it comes to templatizing, if that's a word and automating their creativity, their work, their business, any of that stuff, when you start templatizing it, turning it into a template, something that's repeatable, when you start talking like that, all of a sudden they shut down.

Brian: There's no way. You could turn my creative genius into a template. There's no way you can take my process and turn it into a product high service that can be delivered over and over again, like some fast food restaurant. There's no way I hate to tell you there is a way.

Brian: In many cases, you're not going to thrive without it. is all about [00:21:00] efficiency. Efficiency is how I beat my competition with studios in Nashville. Over the last 30 years, studios in Nashville have just been shutting down, dropping like flies.

Brian: And yet for a full decade between 2010 and 2020, I increased my income every single year for a decade. Until 2020, developers bought my building, leveled it to the ground. It's now a hole in the ground in downtown Nashville. Sad to see it. And I decided to focus on six figure creative,

Brian: but I did it by automating, delegating all the things I'm talking about this podcast. I wanted to bring this up because there's certain basic things that freelancers are just not doing,

Brian: especially around automation and templates. I'll just talk automation really quick. I had a guy come to me who's making his invoices in Microsoft word, exporting them as PDS, attaching them to an email, sending it to the client. I don't really know how they pay that. Do they send a transfer check?

Brian: Is there a PayPal email in there he sent? I don't really understand it. I haven't fully dived into it yet.

Brian: I'm ragging on a new client who just, is onboarding right now with us. read his onboarding form and that was one of the things within his onboarding form. if you're listening person now that I'm not going to name, apologize.

Brian: I've never seen an platform [00:22:00] that didn't make this pretty damn easy. And it's pretty easy to like make an invoice and send it and have them pay through like whatever system Stripe, PayPal, whatever. Now that's not hard to do. What is a little harder to do is actually automate this whole process.

Brian: To take it a step up and this specific client is that same client I was talking about earlier who's working with like 50 something clients a year. He's working with lot of projects. So think about manually creating I think he probably splits every invoice into two, like every project's two.

Brian: So that's a hundred plus invoices a year made in Microsoft word exported in a PDF, attached to an email and sent to the client manually over a hundred times a year. That's wild to me in my business. every invoice is automated

Brian: unless it's like one of us taking a manual payment over a, call or something. Otherwise I don't send out invoices ever. Same with contracts. Contracts can be the same ordeal. I haven't. Looked into his business yet, but I assume it's the same deal. He's sending a contract via like Microsoft word, no idea how he's getting it signed digitally.

Brian: But contracts we've got fully automated in our business. Every single client gets a contract sent to them automatically. It gets automated reminders for them to sign it until they sign it. If they don't sign it after three automated reminders, then it goes to [00:23:00] my team to manually follow up and figure out what's the holdup, right?

Brian: When they sign it, then it sends the next thing. And then it sends the next thing. Our entire onboarding process is fully automated at this point. All of the emails associated with. onboarding all of the follow up reminders. You can even automate project updates. So I've seen businesses where, they're doing a lot of work in something like ClickUp. So they have project management. Tied in. for example, let's just say you have a website for a client that you're creating. Every new client comes in.

Brian: When the client is fully onboarded, they start their project. It loads a template in ClickUp. Again, templates are great for this. A template for the project of all the things you've got to do for that specific client. And then what you can do is After every single major step that you've completed in ClickUp, you've done it, you can have a template email queued up, ready to go, that as soon as you mark that thing as completed, it shoots an email out to the client.

Brian: Hey, Mr. Client. Hey, Mrs. Client. It could just be I've finished wireframing your website. Here's a quick update. I have

Brian: just set up your Webflow account, whatever, even small updates like that. This sort of like regular communication is underrated for most clients, especially in projects where you're not really interfacing with the [00:24:00] client very much, where you're like sitting alone in a cave, just doing your work. These sorts of project updates can be wonderful for making sure your client understands all the wonderful work you're doing for them and that you are constantly working on your work with your client.

Brian: So you can automate all those things and you can create templates for. Proposals. If you're one of the 1 percent of freelancers who has to use a proposal in order to get clients, you can create templates for that. you should always have templates for all of your creative work.

Brian: There's not a scenario where you cannot speed up your creative process by creating templates. This is the same for videographers, for photographers, for graphic designers, for web designers, for music producers, audio engineers, mixing engineers, master engineers. All of us can use templates to speed the process up.

Brian: And I'll give you a little backstory with my business as a mixing engineer, I worked predominantly with heavy metal bands. That was my niche, right? And in the heavy metal genre, there's still five or six sub genres of bands that I would work with regularly. All of those had their own, what I call starter template.

Brian: All of those had go to guitar tones that I'd captured into my Kemper profiler. If you know what that is, you know what it is. If you don't, don't worry about it. I'd have all these things templatized to where my assistant could set it all up. He knew which, template to [00:25:00] choose. I would tell him which template to choose, which tones to choose.

Brian: I'll give him all sorts of parameters to get started. Took me three minutes. And then the engineer would go off for hours and hours and hours to do it, all the work. And then I can open up the session and I would just do the final 10%.

Brian: So automation and templates are your secret weapon to succeed, especially in a hyper competitive environment. Recording studios, it's not quite a button seat service. Music production, not quite a button seat service. But it's getting there with how popular home studio gear is, how cheap it is, how there are literally websites, lander.

Brian: com, L A N D R. com automated AI assisted mixing and mastering another new mastering. I think they do mixing now, maybe even full production. that's how competitive it is. So when AI comes for your job, you better at the very least let automation templates speed up your process so you can be more efficient.

Brian: again, here's how this is tied to me dominating in my niche is because. I was able to keep my rates affordable for the clients that I'm working with, while still having crazy good profit margins and dollars per hour that I earned. You do not, in heavy metal music production in Nashville, Tennessee, make [00:26:00] 300 bucks an hour.

Brian: Except when you do it right.

Brian: All right. Number 11. Unconventional truth is being friendly can be more profitable than being professional. This is a fun one for me to just talk about as I've gone into six figure creative I'm, coaching slash consulting.

Brian: We're more of a consultancy than just coaching because we have frameworks and systems and stuff that we, deploy with our clients, but the clients that we consult I think we just hit 200 yesterday. So we're right at that 200 kind of threshold that we're actively working with right now.

Brian: I've gotten into more and more and more B2B freelancers. With my background in music production, I never worked B2B, but now with 200 plus clients, I'd say most of our clients are B2B at this point. And the problem with B2B is since you're a freelancer, small Mr. and Mrs.

Brian: freelancer working with big Mr. Powerful business owner, since that's your perception, at least tend to talk more professionally, more buttoned up, you know, suit and tie professional, but even in B2B, you're working with other humans. You're not working with some big business machine even the largest businesses, you're working with somebody in a department just a normal human being with their own.

Brian: weird quirks and desires and goals clients like working with people. They enjoy working with and yes, [00:27:00] professionalism can be appealing I'm not gonna take that away being human first being a professional human likable somebody who They actually want to be around, want to talk to that to me is more powerful than just being professional.

Brian: Now, obviously, professionalism to me is just doing things when you say you're going to do them on time, within scope, communicating really well, like all the basics of being professional. That's what I mean, but like being a little goofy, being human being, letting your personality show, that's the stuff that most B2B world, but it goes a long way to building true relationships with clients.

Brian: so if you have true relationships with clients. They actually like you. They want to work with you more than they're going to. Not only come back to you again and again, which is more money for you. Great. You didn't have to sell your soul for that either. You just, your own weird self.

Brian: You make more money doing that, but they're also going to refer more people to you because they like you. They want to share you with others, right? We have to share you with others. If you're good, but you're kind of like a you're like the handle or you're good, but like. kind of stiff. Kind of Boring. Counterintuitive truth number 11. Being friendly can be more profitable than just being professional. 12. Alright. Number 12 and 13. These are my [00:28:00] last two. I built these up already so hopefully these are good. But I got two more for you. Counterintuitive truth number 12. This one of my favorites is freelancing is more stable than a job if you do it right. I think if you asked. Anyone on the street, just any average human that knows what a freelancer is and you would say, which one is more stable freelancing or a day job?

Brian: And most people would just say, yeah, a day job. Obviously you get paid the same amount every month. You get little 5 percent raises every year. Maybe my only experience in a raise in my life was going from five 15 an hour, 5 and to 5. 50 an hour over two years working at GameStop in my teens. I don't know about real raises,

Brian: although I guess that is a 6. 8 percent raise, which is kind of good. That's pretty good. Yeah. I got a 7 percent raise. Let's go.

Brian: And if you're listening to the show, no, I did not just do the math out of my head. I paused for a second and did the math on my computer anyways. it feels more stable because you get the same amount every month, right? However, an employer can fire you instantly.

Brian: They can let you off at a moment's notice. It is one source of income in your life. And any one source of income is one single point of failure. That is a [00:29:00] day job. And that to me is not stable. That's not predictable. That is not reliable to me. A well run freelance business with multiple clients, multiple forms of getting clients, a sustainable way of getting new clients and new leads.

Brian: That to me is way more stable than a solo job or career because every single client that you have one individual source of income, especially if you follow our 10 percent rule which is. No one client is worth more than 10 percent of your income. And for us in this business, because we've, like I said, we just hit 200 clients, each client represents like half a percent of our income.

Brian: If I'm doing math correctly, if it was a hundred clients, it'd be 1%. 200 clients is a half percent, one half percent. Of our income is one client. So whether I lose or gain a client, it does not affect my income in any substantial way.

Brian: There's a famous Warren Buffett quote It's about diversification and investments. what you'll hear a lot of the investment world is you need to diversify your, investments so that. You don't have too much risk in one area, right? Basically he's just saying, like most people, don't just put all your all your money into like one stock. Don't just go buy [00:30:00] Bitcoin, right? Warren Buffett has this famous quote that says, put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket. He can do that because Warrantland they have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash just sitting around, so at point he can just go buy Coca Cola.

Brian: If you don't know who Warren Buffett is, he owns Berkshire Hathaway. He's oldest hell. awesome, Awesome investor. And at this point, Berkshire owns a lot of companies, Coca Cola, Geico, dairy queen, sees candies. Clayton Holmes. If you're from the South, you know what are. they own Fruit of the Loom. They have significant holdings in Apple, Coca Cola, I mentioned already, American Express. They own 20 percent of American Express.

Brian: Kraft Heinz. All this to say, just Put a bunch of money into a company, especially when they can gain majority control and they can control how the company is run.

Brian: When you work for someone else, you control nothing other than your day to day work and how you perform. And with massive layoffs happening all the time, you cannot control that, right? You can be amazing at your job, but you just get laid off because your role is no longer needed the company downsized.

Brian: And now you're gone, [00:31:00] right? You don't control that. So you can't control any of those X, right? And a freelance business, when you have, learned the skill of client acquisition of lead generation of sales, of fulfillment, automation, delegate, all the crap that I talk about for full stack freelancing.

Brian: When you figured all that out and you can predictably get clients coming in, especially for recurring revenue. If you have a retainer service or subscription service as a freelancer, my God, that get way, way more stable and way easier. When you start to build that up and you have preferably 20 to 30 clients a year.

Brian: That to me is a better example of putting all your eggs in one basket, the freelancing basket and building it and watching it and running it. Well, That is true diversification. So at this point in my life, I have put all my eggs in the six figure credit basket, but I'm in the most stable, reliable, high growth basket I've ever done.

Brian: I have a great team. I have great clients. I have very sustainable way of getting new clients every single month. We retain a high percentage, 96. 3 percent of our clients, something like that every month. And we're not on long term contracts with anybody. So in that regard, I am incredibly stable, way more than just having a job somewhere.

Brian: And that's not to [00:32:00] say that the economy can't turn, we have a bunch of our clients cancel, having a chunk of our clients cancel is still better than something happening where I just get laid off from a job and I lose 100 percent of my income versus a 10, 20 percent would be a meaningful swing, but that's number 12.

Brian: Unconventional truth is freelancing is more stable than a day job if you run it right. That leads me to 13. This is a fun, hot topic for a lot of freelancers. But this is my unconventional truth when it comes to freelancing. Passive income isn't always the answer. Earlier where I talked about diversification of income, right?

Brian: A lot of freelancers, they're like, the first thing you jump to is like, well, I'm just going to start doing passive income. I've got a, day job. I've started part time freelancing. I'm also going to start doing some passive income things. Sell some courses, do some templates, whatever,

Brian: not only do any meaningful passive income streams require an insane amount of upfront work. Anything meaningful that you're going to make a lot of money from passively, I'm using passively in quotes because it's usually not passive, but is truly passive, it takes a lot of time upfront to do that or a lot of money upfront.

Brian: But not only that, let's just say you did create an amazing course you're going to sell or some amazing templates or guides or something. You're going to sell people, [00:33:00] right? In that world, especially in the low ticket world, where you're like selling a course for a hundred bucks or a template or something for 25 bucks, you have to be great, truly great at marketing for that to be a meaningful amount of quote, passive income.

Brian: And again, I'm using passive income here because now your job full time is to sell that thing in order to generate sales for your to a hundred dollar thing. You have to generate a significant number of sales every month. Again, let's just say it's a hundred bucks. And you want to make, six figures, 8, 500 a month.

Brian: You got to sell 85 customers a month. That's a lot. I've never even consistently sold 85 of anything in my life. A month

Brian: look at it that way, and then you realize that most freelancers you're not even good at marketing, much less amazing at it. You don't have the basics of the fundamentals down to marketing yet. So how are you going to sell this low ticket little course, little digital good, whatever.

Brian: How are we going to sell that consistently over time?

Brian: Let's just say you actually go to Etsy. That's another one you could do. you can be creative. You can make little knickknacks and things on Etsy, print shirts, There's a bunch of stuff you can do on Etsy. It's going think the average order value on Etsy last I checked was like 50 to 60 maybe, up to 80 bucks.

Brian: in that world, that's still a significant [00:34:00] amount of sales. You have to make 80 bucks. That's still like to reach six figures a little over a hundred a month So now you are making stuff full time all day, every day. And not just that, whatever goes into the fulfillment and shipping of it.

Brian: Again, there are a lot of people make a ton of money on Etsy. I don't talk to those people because this is not the six figure Etsy podcast. This is a six figure creative podcast. And That's like the maker world. I'm not a maker podcast. If that's what you want to do, there's plenty of resources out there for you on that, but this is not what I'm talking about today.

Brian: For most freelancers, I'll say it again. This goes back to number 12 here a well run freelance business is more profitable. It is more sustainable. It is more reliable than any sort of passive income business or a day job. You need solid pricing, especially if it's recurring, at least 10 clients a year, preferably 20 to 30.

Brian: If you want more stability, and preferably no more than 50 clients a year, unless you've just mastered your systems or have a team at this point, I have

Brian: eight people on my team. We're about to bring on another one or two. So I've got a good team to help support what we're doing. And,

Brian: I am really good at systems and processes. Like I made some amazing systems within our business to fully automate big parts of our business [00:35:00] to take the burden off of me or my team. So that again, even my team are focused on higher value tasks for themselves and they're not bogged down by basic stuff.

Brian: So when you get over 50 clients, You're gonna have to start figuring that stuff out for yourself. And if you're not technically literate, if you are not the type of person who wants to dig in and dive into automation software dive into marketing automation tools and figure out how to tie things together with duct tape and sweat, if that's not you, you likely don't want more than 50 clients a year,

Brian: but regardless, passive income is not always the answer. And in many cases, it's a distraction. So when I have people come to me, that's like, I'm doing, this and I want to do that on the side. I want to sell my little 50 course or 100 course, or I want to do digital products.

Brian: I always tell them, no, I cannot help you with that. It will not work for what I know. I don't have a business like that because I don't know how to make a business like that work personally. There might be people out there who can, but generally if you're going to sell something that small, you've got to have a free source of traffic and customers.

Brian: And that's going to be organic social media. It's going to be YouTube. It's going to be some sort of large following thing out there where you can sell little knickknacks for nickels and dimes. But as a freelancer, we need a thousand perfect fit clients to follow [00:36:00] us on social media. If that's meaningful way of getting clients for you, you also do paid ads,

Brian: but we're not out there to be professional content creators for the rest of our lives. I don't want that for anybody who doesn't want it. If that's what you want, go for it. those are the 13 unconventional truth of freelancing. Hopefully some of these are things that you've thought of doing that I've maybe dissuade you from doing.

Brian: Maybe some of these things are just reinforcing your own beliefs that you have. But at the end of the day, I think these are pretty solid truths.

Brian: Just to recap them one more time because I like recapping the list you do not need more clients You need better clients higher value clients, especially if you already got a lot of clients number two. You don't have to work more hours to make more money Number three, working fewer hours can actually make you more money because you don't get burnout.

Brian: You have more creative juice to use. Number four, you don't have to be the best. You just have to be the most invisible. here's the of the count of that. If you can be the best and the most visible, you're going to rake it in here and make a lot of money. Number five, you don't need thousands of followers to get high paying clients.

Brian: Just get the thousand of the right followers. Number six, the easiest marketing strategy is simply following up. how many leads have you let die in your inbox? How many worm [00:37:00] connections do you have in your network that you have just not harvested fruit dying on the vine right now?

Brian: Easiest marketing strategies is simply following up. Number seven proposals are a waste of time in almost every case. Change my mind. Number eight, clients don't always know what they need. They think, no, they think they need, but they don't actually know what they need. Number nine, your clients are not always right.

Brian: So when they ask for shit, that's going to ruin the project. Just say no. Number 10, automation and templates are your secret weapons. Efficiency will always make you more money. In some way, shape, or form in your business. number 11, being friendly can be more profitable than being professional.

Brian: So just be your damn self be weird. Sometimes there are plenty of B2B examples of people that are quirky and weird that crush it. And B2B number 12 freelancing is more stable than a job. If you do it right. And number 13, passive income isn't always the right answer. And I'd say in most cases for freelancers, it's the wrong answer.

Brian: So that's all I got for you today. If you're interested in being our 201st client, just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching. You can learn what I've learned about bringing in hundreds of clients, myself, [00:38:00] how we help clients get dozens of clients, in many cases. Not even getting any more clients.

Brian: We'll get you less clients. And a lot of cases, that's what we shoot for. We shoot for less clients with some of the people we work with because, either they don't have enough diversification. So they're working with like. one $30,000 project at a time. They'll work on three or four projects a year that is damn near close to just contracting.

Brian: And if you've heard my episode the title is contracting is for Suckers, there's a better way to freelance, you'll know why I don't like contractors. So in those cases, we get you more clients at a lower value and we productize it in a way that's easier to deliver. So you're not spending, hundred hours plus to deliver on a, project.

Brian: Anyways, That can be what we do for you. It might be more packaging and pricing issues. It might be, we just need to generate a bunch of leads, put fuel on the fire, get you more clients in the door. It might be. And this is a big one for some of our clients is you've got a lot of just fruit dying on the really low hanging fruit that we can harvest and get you like five, 10, 15 grand in clients very quickly.

Brian: That is not promise by the way. I don't think I can allow to promise that. in many cases. Clients come to us. They have none of that. So we can't do anything like that. But in some cases, there's just so much low hanging fruit. That's [00:39:00] just not being picked up right now. All I got to do is reach out and pick it.

Brian: We'll show you how to pick it. So if that sounds like something you might have, or if you're just like, I don't have any of that, I just need clients, Brian, help me go to six for your creative. com slash coaching. We will create a marketing plan for you. We will pitch that marketing plan to you. You can reject it.

Brian: You pay us nothing. You can accept it. We will coach you month to month. No contracts. You can become our 201st client, or by the time this episode airs, maybe 215th client. I don't know. Either way. We'll have to work with you. sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching. Fill out the application. See if you're a good fit.

Brian: If it is, we'll chat. Thank you so much for listening to the six figure creative podcast. See you next week.

Brian: Oh, fun fact right now. You're still listening. This episode airs the week I am on the nerdiest cruise on earth. So if you want a little fun thing to do, Google uh, Joko cruise, J O C O cruise. My wife gets invited to this. She got invited last year. We got invited back this year. we get to go to this for free.

Brian: I'm like, heck yeah. It's like six grand or more to go to this thing. it's like the world's nerdiest cruise. They have tons of board games. literally tons of board games. They have music. They have certain stars last year that Oscar from the office there.

Brian: I don't know who they have this year. They have fun, [00:40:00] like community driven events cosplay stuff. Look it up. You'll see what I'm talking about. we had so much fun last year. So I'm looking forward to it again this year. I will be on it while this episode airs.

Brian: So shoot me an email. I'll tell you how it is. Anyways, peace.