What Are You Willing to Give Up to Grow Your Freelance Business?

383. What are you willing to give up

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Brian: [00:00:00] What do you think the number one thing is that gets in the way of progress?

Brian: For anyone I've ever worked with? Helping them with their business. If you guessed a lack of time, you'd be right. The problem with this is it is almost always an excuse. There's some rare cases where it's not an excuse, but this is almost always an excuse, and I can tell you this because I've seen this across.

Brian: A large demographic of people at this point. Hundreds of people that we've worked with and that we've helped, and we've seen people in situations where they have lots of responsibilities. They have a family, they have a full-time job, or they have a very demanding business with lots and lots of clients and lots of projects, and maybe even doing community roles or they're taking care of, extended family.

Brian: And yet those people I've seen time and time again, still make progress in their business. The people who have the most excuses for a lack of time, don't let lack of time hold them back. I'll flip this to the other extreme. This is what I see. A lot of it's people who have no real reasons that would hold them back.

Brian: I've seen everything from just simple like, Hey, you're a freelancer. This is your full-time thing. There should be no real things holding you back. You're [00:01:00] single, you're unmarried. You don't have kids. There's really nothing holding you back there. But I've seen the. Complete extremely case where we had somebody come in, they had just been let go of their job.

Brian: They had no family, they had no clients. they were starting from scratch. They had literally absolutely zero reason to have time as a complaint or an excuse as to why they weren't making progress, and yet that was their excuse. That was their problem. They were not making progress constantly over and over again because they quote, lack of time.

Brian: Now, the reality is most people kinda live in between one of those two extremes. Most people don't have. All the responsibilities that some people have, they don't have the extended family they're taking care of or health issues they're dealing with, or, a large family or a full-time job.

Brian: And also everyone just has likeseemingly all the time in the world. So you're probably somewhere in the middle. You might have a wife or a husband. You might have one or two kids. maybe you do have some of things that should hold you back or maybe you just have no major responsibilities.

Brian: Everybody has stuff to do, right?

Brian: But at the end of the day, we all have the same 24 hours. So why is it some people can [00:02:00] get way more done in those 24 hours than other people?

Brian: Why is it some people seemingly with everything holding them back, can still make progress. While some people who have literally the sky's the limit of what they could do with their time, still can't make progress. Well, there are two levers for progress. The one is prioritization, which I'm gonna talk about in another episode. This is basically saying, am I actually working on the right things? This can be a huge problem for some people, which is why I'm gonna have a whole episode on it, probably the next episode everything goes as planned.

Brian: But the other lever, and the thing I wanna talk about in this episode is just simply trade-offs. IE what are you willing to give up in the short term to gain what you want in the long term? And this one's really tough for a lot of people, including myself sometimes in some seasons.

Brian: but the reality is we have to make time for the things that we care about.

Brian: You can say that you want to grow your freelance business, but do your actions actually show that? If you look at just other areas in life, there's many people who say they'd love to be something they'd say, I'd love to be jacked. Or I'd love to be fit, or I'd love to be a millionaire, or I'd love to be good at whatever.

Brian: I'd love to be good at pottery. I'd love to be good at video games. I'd love to be good at [00:03:00] your craft. Mixing music, mastering music, producing songs, building beautiful websites. Also convert people, strangers, into customers. It isn't just a, flashy looking website. You can say you wanna be good at those things or even great at those things, but very few people are willing to do what it takes to actually get there.

Brian: Myself included, there's many things in my life that I would love to be or love to do, but I just accept the fact that I'm not willing to do what it takes to get those things.

Brian: I'm not willing to make the sacrifices. I'm not willing to put in the hard work that it takes to be a scratch golfer. Like I love golf, but the lowest my handicap has ever been is like a six. I will probably not get much below that in this season of life right now because I just don't have what it takes from a time perspective, from an emotional perspective.

Brian: I get too mad, et cetera, et cetera. So I just accept I'm not really cut out for this. And sometimes you have to have that honest conversation with yourself to ask yourself, are you really even cut out for this? For some people, in some things, the answer is no, and that's okay. For some of you, freelancing may not be the thing that you were meant to do, and if that's the case, just accept it [00:04:00] and don't waste your time, effort, energy, put yourself into debt, wasting time and effort, trying to make it work when you really shouldn't be.

Brian: But for everyone else where freelancing is for you, and you do want to break through a plateau or stop that yearly decline in your income that you're dealing with, or you wanna start getting higher quality clients or you just wanna make more money, the question I have for you is, what are you willing to give up?

Brian: if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creative freelancers who are trying to make more money from their creative skills, and you wanna do it without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. And one of the ways that we have to consider making more money is by properly investing our time that we have the same 24 hours every day into what we do

Brian: and in another episode, probably the next episode, we're gonna talk about prioritization. So you're actually working on the right things and investing those hours wisely. But in this episode, I'm gonna talk about the things that are actually pulling you away. It's like the junk food of our time.

Brian: So let's talk about some of the common trade-off categories. That we can look at and say, what am I willing to give up [00:05:00] some of or all of for a season in order to get what I want out of my freelance business or whatever it is you're working on. This really could pertain to anything, but we're talking about building your freelance business, client acquisition or building systems out for smoother, better process, building your onboarding process, your offboarding process, whatever it is that you're working on.

Brian: Actually having the time to do so without making the excuse that, oh, I just don't have time to do that. The first category, and this is probably the biggest one for most people, is entertainment.

Brian: If you honestly add up the amount of hours you spend on Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, video games, Instagram, whatever, social media app is your poison,

Brian: it's a startling number. my personal vice is YouTube. I will spend hours on YouTube. That is my, like, downtime. That's my lunchtime. I don't watch Netflix. I do play video games sometimes. That's another one that I'll do. Sometimes I'll talk about how I balance it later on.

Brian: But these are things that if you look at the amount of sheer hours thatyou're spending on something, It'll surprise you. there's an app on your phone or like a setting on your phone that shows screen time. You can look at your [00:06:00] weekly app time on different apps, like your social media apps, and I've seen people that'll have like 10, 15 hours a week or more on TikTok or Instagram.

Brian: Myself, I've had that many hours on YouTube alone, and I know this because I have an app called Rescue Time installed on all my.laptop in my desktop, but not my phone. 'cause it doesn't really work on your phone very well. You can use screen time for that, but it logs all the hours that I'm physically doing something on my computer, what browser I'm in, how long I'm on there.

Brian: it logs that stuff for me completely passively and has been since like 2014, I think over 10 years I have of data of like, it gives me a productivity score. It's a wonderful app. I highly recommend it. I'm not affiliated with 'em. I don't get a commission for it. I don't get a anything. I just have been using it for over a decade.

Brian: As a way to keep myself in check when I'm getting too far off.

Brian: But remember, we're not trying to cut out all of it. what I ask people to find is try to find five more, five to eight more hours per week. 10 tops is really all you need to work on your business to do the things to build for the future. That's all we're really looking for here.

Brian: 10 hours, let's just say on the high end, 10 hours is what we're looking for

Brian: Between Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, or social media [00:07:00] and video games alone, you can likely find those 10 hours and you could probably do it without cutting out all of your use of all those things. And remember, this is just for a season, but that's just the first category here. That's just the entertainment category.

Brian: The next one is social life. Now this is where we get out of the junk food category and we start actually saying. Social life is actually a great thing, not just a good thing, a great thing. We should all have a social life as best we can. And as you get older it can be more difficult, but for some people still, they have a very active social life and this does take up a significant portion of their time.

Brian: And there can be seasons for that where it makes sense and you're actually getting clients through your network. And I'm not saying any of this is bad, but I am saying this is maybe getting ahead of ourselves for the prioritization episode on the,hopefully the next episode where.

Brian: Is that the highest and best use of your time right now in this stage in your life?

Brian: Even if networking is getting new clients? Is that the main issue in your business right now? For some people, you have too many clients. That's a real issue and you're trying to balance these things and your time needs to be spent. The little bit of time you can carve out through the things I'm talking about in this episode need to be spent, invested, actually invested into [00:08:00] building out systems, processes, automations.

Brian: Tools, structure, your CRM, anything you can do to buy back your time permanently.

Brian: And while my social life is not the thing I'm gonna cut out first, it's something to consider, especially people with a more active social life. If you go to a lot of parties, happy hours, weekend events, things like that. And the side benefit of this is generally if you have an active social life, it tends to be later in the evening.

Brian: And if you cut out some of the social events, especially later,night, things, which means you end up going to bed earlier, which means you end up waking up earlier, You can work in early hours before people start bothering you.

Brian: And those are wonderful, what I call power hours. I'll talk about those later, in the next episode. But these are really powerful hours that allow you to get a lot done without the weight of people bothering you. And for some of you if you have a day job, this is before you actually go to work.

Brian: For those of you who are full-time freelancers, this is before you actually start your creative work.

Brian: But for many people, the social life can get in the way of that.

Brian: Just remember, I'm not saying to throw away your social life. I'm not saying to cut all of it out even, and I'm not saying cut it out forever for sure. I'm saying what are [00:09:00] you willing to give up right now to fix the thing that's actually holding you back right now in your business to make progress?

Brian: The next area to look to are weakens. Now you have 10 to 20 really highly productive hours during the weekend that you can invest into your business. Now, I'm not saying that's necessary for everybody, and I don't do that. I don't work weekends. I don't work nights. I generally work eight to four, nine to five, sometimes eight to five during the week, and that's all I do.

Brian: And I just try to make sure those hours are as productive as possible so I don't have to work nights. I don't have to work early mornings. I don't have to work weekends. But if, I am in a season where I'm constantly behind or there's a major problem or there's something I have to fix, weekends are there for me to work on those things.

Brian: when I'm talking about we're only looking for like 10 hours a week to work on your business, to start fixing some of the things that are wrong with your business, fundamentally, especially the foundational things, especially for those of you who are struggling on the client acquisition side, 10 hours a week is not hard to find.

Brian: 'cause you have it on the weekends for most people, even if you have a day job. You can find 10 hours during the weekend.

Brian: Now I've got two more that are a little more like left field, a little weirder, [00:10:00] but they're things that do eat up a lot of your time that are worth thinking about.

Brian: The first one is your comfort tasks. These are the things that are the easier tasks that feel productive. You probably even like doing or,want to do because they feel like you're accomplishing stuff. But ifyou just objectively look at those tasks that you're doing, they just don't move the needle.

Brian: know, I've talked about this in past episodes. I can't remember what episode it was, but. Things where you're like tinkering with your website again, you're redoing your logo again.

Brian: You're revamping your portfolio again.

Brian: Doing things that are kind of like pointless, like staying at inbox zero throughout the day versus like batching at morning and evening.

Brian: doing things like color coding things and making,this is actually getting like the OCD territory, A lot of times people fall into these sort of things when they are stressed and they wanna feel like they have control and they're making progress in things.

Brian: They do these like meaningless things. And if you're that type of person, this can eat up a lot of time. The second one of these like weird kind of categories to talk through is perfectionism. Very similar, but. You can feel like you are working on something very important. It could be your most important project.

Brian: It could [00:11:00] be the client. You wanna just wow the end result forAnd you let perfectionism drag you through the project as slow as possible. And so you start polishing every detail over overanalyzing things And usually what this ends up doing is making it worse. I know from my experience, at least when I try to do perfection on something, Probably about,

Brian: 20% past the point where it should be done is when it starts going backwards the other way. It's almost like, um,An as ope, if you're on YouTube, I can show you, but it's like a line that goes up rapidly and then starts to plateau atthe very top.

Brian: That's kind of like what. Creativity is when you're looking at creative progress on something, trying to achieve perfection in creative work is not possible. the first amount of time we do something is making a ton of progress, but at a certain point there's a diminishing return at the top and there is a certain point where it is not worth another second of your time.

Brian: And I actually think at a certain point it starts declining because in music production, like your ears get tired and mixing or mastering. your creativity starts to wane, and so you start making bad decisions in web design and,graphic design. [00:12:00] There's a lot of similar things in that world, although I don't have direct experience doing web design or brand design or, copywriting or anything else of the other listeners on the show, but I'm sure you can relate where you just start making poor decisions.

Brian: So not only does the extra time not yield much better results, it actually yields worse results. So you're spinning time trying to perfect something that by very definition cannot be perfected. And then you're going beyond that and making it even worse. So knowing the point of when it's time to stop and call something as done is a huge part of saving time.

Brian: Gaining back time so that you can actually invest in the things that are really important in your business that you may not want to do. The non comfort tasks, those tasks that you dread doing because you've gone this long without doing them and that's why you are where you're at. it can feel a lot better to try to perfect that one project you got this month 'cause you wanna crush it instead of worrying about how do I get four more of these?

Brian: I'm gonna remind you again, perfectionism, comfort tasks. These are probably forever things. Like you should just get rid of those altogether [00:13:00] and gain as much time back as you can. these aren't as easy as like Netflix and YouTube and TikTok and social life. The sort of sacrifices where you can say, Hey, these are not forever and these are just gonna be temporary.

Brian: The perfectionism. These sorts of things. That should be forever, but that's gonna be a constant battle. It's going to be like, how many battles can you win? Not can I win the war? The war will never be done. The war will go on for the rest of your life. But how many battles can you win in a row?

Brian: But these are. For the first part of this, these are temporary sacrifices to unlock the long-term gain in your business so that we can be around longer. So we can do this for a living so we can actually enjoy what we're doing instead of working for someone else. If you're like me, am unemployable. I literally could not get a job if I wanted to, and I don't want one.

Brian: So it's like doubly like, you don't want me, I don't want you. Good. I'm moving on. I wanna be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future.

Brian: So I have to make this work. So if you're in the position where you have to make this work, what are you willing to give up? Because every time you say no to something that is trivial, something that is not helping your business, not pushing it forward, not helping, the biggest problem in your business right now, which is the [00:14:00] fact that you can't invest time into it to fix these problems.

Brian: Every time you say no to those trivial things, you're saying yes to what you actually care about. You're saying yes to getting jacked, to getting shredded. You're saying yes to getting your golf handicapped down to where you're finally a scratch golfer or a below par golfer. You're saying yes to being amazing at pottery whatever,whatever hobby you're, working on.

Brian: when you say no to something else, you're saying yes to something else. And many people, you have this thought that you can just endlessly say yes to every single thing in your life. And then you fail to realize every time you say yes, you're also saying no by default to something that really does matter again, we all have the same 24 hours.

Brian: It is a currency. So every yes, you say to something or someone that is not your priority, the thing that you actually want. You were saying no to your priority and the thing that you want. So don't just say you want to grow your freelance business. Show it with your choices, and ask yourself, what am I willing to cut out or reduce or pause for a season to make space for progress in my business, to give me what I want, or in your case, give you what you want.

Brian: I encourage you just. At the end of this episode, [00:15:00] sit in silence for a minute and just think about it or play some d Droney ass music, like a techno, anything with a droning beat and no vocals on it. So you can just like zone out and just think through what are you willing to and need to cut out in your life right now in this season.

Brian: That's all I got for you this episode. Shorter but sweet. I'll see you on next week's episode where I think I'll talk about part two, the other lever here, which is, prioritization. When you do have time, what should you actually be working on? That's all I got for you this week. I will see you on the six Figure Creative Podcast next week. Peace.