Why Perfectionism Is Killing Your Income—The $92/hr vs. $462/hr Problem

354. The argument for working faster (efficiency vs perfection)

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Brian: [00:00:00] Creatives love to make things perfect. We literally get into this because we like making things. We like crafting things. We like designing things, we like producing things. Whatever it is that we do for a living we love to do that thing, right?

Brian: But the problem with that is we want to perfect everything that we do because as creatives, we want everything we do to be perfect. That's just how we operate, right? But in this episode, I wanna make the argument that we should be spending more of our effort on being efficient versus being perfect.

Brian: And here's why. Freelancers end up spending their time perfecting every little tiny piece of the project instead of actually just getting it done to the client specifications. What the client actually wants and what the client wants is actually what really matters more than what we want as creatives.

Brian: So when we start perfecting things and spending time perfecting and over perfecting and overdoing, and redoing, and undoing, and redoing again and again and again. you end spending too much time fulfilling on what you're paid to do. And when you're spending too much time fulfilling on what you're paid to do, you have to raise your rates to compensate yourself for that time. And when we raise our rates, compensate for that time, we end up losing out on gigs to other freelancers who can work more efficiently, thus get the gig [00:01:00] because they can charge less, or we end up making less per hour on the project if we did win the project because we're spending too many hours on the project, way more hours than we should be spending on the project.

Brian: Bottom line, you end up either just losing the project out rate or you end up tanking your dollars per hour. How much you earn per hour or maybe money per hour is a better way of, doing this. So lemme give you an, example of something that I came across recently. I recently audited a client's time sheet. This is where uh, they basically go through and they, put all of their times in and what it takes them to do a service or fulfill on a project. And I was looking at this client and their estimate for a project was 3,700 bucks, and the time spent on the project was 40 hours.

Brian: And if you're doing quick math in your head, that's $92 and 50 cents an hour. The problem is that I've fulfilled on the exact same service, in the exact same niche for all of that in about eight hours, the exact same thing, eight hours time,

Brian: and so at 92, 50 an hour, that means I don't have the charge. 740 bucks for the exact same project. I don't have to charge 740 bucks. That's five times less. So in this scenario, who's gonna get the gig? If for the same quality, I'm gonna get the gig. If I'm better this person, I'm gonna get the gig a hundred percent of the [00:02:00] time.

Brian: If I'm even slightly worse, I might still get the gig because, am I five times worse? Is five times the price that he's charging worth what he's giving? Is it five times better? Some people might say yes, many people will say no and they'll hire me because I'm almost as good for five times less than he's charging.

Brian: So in most cases, I'm obviously gonna get the gig in this scenario right, because I'm able to fulfill more efficiently, do the same or better quality in eight hours than he's doing in 40 hours. I'll likely get the gig. But let's look at the profit side of this. This is another part that freelancers don't think about.

Brian: If we're similar quality or even maybe I'm slightly better and I still charge the same 3,700 bucks that he's charging for his 40 hour project, but I take eight hours to fulfill on that. I make $462 and 50 cents an hour.

Brian: So if, we charge the same and I'm just more efficient, I get 460 bucks an hour, and that's not far off from what I was actually getting per hour in my decade of freelancing. I was averaging over three 50 an hour.

Brian: So this episode I just wanna break down, have a good rant some tactical things, some takeaways on just being more efficient, killing your damn perfectionism. Focusing on results lets you [00:03:00] finish faster, win more gigs because you're able to charge more competitively. Maybe slightly less than some people.

Brian: That's what I did. I charged slightly less, gave more value, and I still earned more per hour than those people did. or you'll just be able to earn more per hour because you offer similar quality in half the time. So this is your first time ever listening to the podcast.

Brian: Hi, I'm Brandon Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls. I take a lot of influence from a lot of different industries, a lot of different types of freelancers and a lot of different people in like completely different industries like SaaS, love the SaaS world, best practices from those worlds and bring 'em to what we're doing here.

Brian: And efficiency is one of those things, honestly, that a lot of other industries focus on, especially the manufacturing industry.

Brian: That's where the, theory of constraints come from, which I love, and I talk about this all the time on the podcast. I'm not gonna talk about it right now.

Brian: but my belief is if we take influence from all these other industries and all these other types of freelancers out there, that we can make our businesses better.

Brian: So let's get into this. One of my differentiators has always been efficiency. it's a rare creative trait to really focus on, efficiency. But I think it comes down to more of a form of laziness.

Brian: There's a [00:04:00] quote, I'm gonna paraphrase it 'cause I'm gonna butcher this, but it's something like, if you wanna find the most efficient way of doing something, give the tasks to a lazy person. I dunno how true that is. And maybe the lazy person would, cut too many into corners, but I. At the end of the day, there's a lot of truth to that.

Brian: A lazy person is going to just say, I don't really wanna do this, so what's the easiest way to do it? Now, obviously we don't wanna approach our businesses this way. We don't wanna have that attitude with this, but there is some truth to just being a person who's always spotting inefficiencies in what they do.

Brian: Anytime I look at how I do something or how someone else does something, I spot all the different ways that that person is being so inefficient with their time with things as simple as just like, basic, hotkeys or, shortcuts on their keyboard to like even what software they're using. So for example, if you're a Chrome user, which you should be in most cases there's also arc, which I try don't love.

Brian: If you're a Chrome user, which most people are. Everyone knows, you know, hit command T to open up a tab, hit command W or Ctrl W if your windows command W to close a tab on the browser. Everyone knows those, but did you know about command shift T? if you hit command and shift T, it'll open up the last tab or series of tabs that you've closed.

Brian: So all those times that you've accidentally closed a tab, you can [00:05:00] just quickly open it back up. It's a game changer. Most people don't know that, and maybe you did. But as you know about command option left and right on the keys, if you hit command and option and you hit left and right on the keys, it'll quickly move between taps.

Brian: I use these little things all day, every day.

Brian: There's a software that I use called Alfred. It is literally like Spotlight on Apple, but it's 10 times better. It has a calculator built in. You can, create shortcuts to literally every website you've ever wanted to go to. And you type the first three letters and opens it up. You can open up any program with a matter of like one and a half seconds.

Brian: You can create what they call workflows, where you just type one key command and it opens up. All the programs and windows and browser tabs in the exact order that you want them in one keystroke. It's incredible. Why am I saying all this?

Brian: These are just a few dumb examples of things that I use every day to be more efficient, and I use these things a billion times a day, all day, every day. ' because I'm working from my laptop so much, these things are important to me because it's speeding up the workflow of something I do many, many, many, many times.

Brian: And it may only be a second here, a few seconds there, but those things really add up. And it is the same in any software you use. Any process that you do, those seconds add up over time.

Brian: Too many times that we obsess over perfection of [00:06:00] the craft that we're doing and we don't obsess over. The way we're doing it many times, you can get the exact same result in a third of the time, half the time, a 10th of the time if you just approach it from a different way because you obsess over a different thing.

Brian: my goal for this episode isn't to just completely fix your business, it's to just change your mindset and the way you think about what you're doing every day, especially those things that you do over and over and over and over and over again. Is there a faster, better, cheaper, more efficient, smoother way to do it.

Brian: too many times, we let obsession and perfection blind us to how much time we're wasting. And I'm not talking about those times where know, you are wasting time on something like.

Brian: There's times, I definitely do this where I'm just obsessing over something and I know I'm obsessing over and it's really stupid and I know it's really stupid, but I want this thing perfect. I'm not talking about those times. We all go through those unless that's like you all the time, every day.

Brian: I'm actually talking about those times where we don't know we're being inefficient. We don't know where we're wasting time.

Brian: I am talking about those other 50 times where you do it unconsciously. Those are the things that eat away at our time and end up making you spend 40 hours on something that should take eight hours.

Brian: I'm talking about the things you do on every project where you're just saying, Hey, that's how I've always done it, right? I'm using air quotes [00:07:00] here. that's how I've always done it. You spend five hours crafting the perfect proposal instead of asking yourself, how can I do it in an hour or less? Or even better yet, asking yourself or the fuck, am I even sending a proposal? Like That's the better question. Why are you even sending proposal? I've talked about this in past episodes, unless you are in very specific niches where you're in like.

Brian: Enterprise sales and there is like a procurement process where they have to get, proposals for the service. Unless you're in that, proposals are a waste of time, absolute waste of time. Do not even create or send these things out.

Brian: Exception is if your client is paying you more than 50 grand.

Brian: when I'm talking about wasting time, I'm talking about all the times that your client has wasted your time because you failed to put boundaries in place. Simple boundaries.

Brian: This is especially important for me and my background. 'cause my background is music, production. I would be in the studio all day every day with the client recording a record, right?

Brian: And so anytime I let the client waste my time, It was my fault because they didn't have a boundary or the backbone to let the client know that's not okay, or No, we don't do it this way, or No, we do it that way. Or, no, no is a complete sentence. You can just say no, and that's that. Go back to the episode I did, I think it was last week or the week [00:08:00] before, where I talked about 13. Unconventional truths or something like that.

Brian: One of those truths was that your client doesn't always know what they want and they're not always right, it's your job to know when the client is wasting your time and not actually pushing the project forward. This goes over revisions too. Revisions is a really good example of this where.

Brian: When you put a boundary around revisions, how many they can do or how many they can do for the price that they're paying, and if they want more, they have to pay. When you put those boundaries in place, not only does it protect you and your time, it usually makes for a better project because so many times, especially when you're working with unsophisticated, people who don't really understand the creative part of what you do many times they're asking for things that don't actually push the project forward at all.

Brian: Or in my world, in music production, they're letting fear ask for those revisions, meaning the client will endlessly. Tweak things all day every day because they're too scared to actually release the song they're doing. Very common in the music production world. I've seen it in other freelance niches as well.

Brian: People that are refusing to put their website out. They want every little thing perfect because they want the website to be perfect because they have this weird stigma where if their website's not perfect, then they're not perfect, and their people will perceive them as imperfect and then they're a failure.

Brian: This is an [00:09:00] every freelance niche. We have an episode on this episode, 298. Just go to six figure creative.com/ 2 9 8. Cheat code. any episode number you want, go to six figure creative.com/that number and you can always find it. So the episode is Six Client Boundaries to Keep You Happy, healthy, stress Free, and Profitable.

Brian: That was from our Infinite Client series, it's like a low key, my favorite series. So the number one thing here when it comes to balancing efficiency with perfection is this. Just make the damn decision. We can easily spend hours and hours endlessly tweaking something, trying to make it perfect in all those little tweaks. This is me preaching to myself all the time. I still struggle with this. Maybe not in all areas, maybe not the same that you might, but I still struggle with this and I definitely struggle with this a decade ago, but

Brian: we can easily spend hours and hours and hours wasting time tweaking things because we're too afraid to commit to something.

Brian: All that stuff adds up, all that endless tweaking because we want to try option A versus option B, versus option C versus option D. We wanna try all these different variations because we're too scared to commit to something. That lack of [00:10:00] commitment, just forcing yourself to make a damn decision that is wasting so much of your time.

Brian: This is the number one thing when I'm looking at my, client I'm referring to here. This is what led to him taking 40 hours where it takes me eight hours when I'm at my best, I. I'm making fast decisions. I'm saying, we're doing this. This is exactly what I want.

Brian: This is exactly what I'm going to do. This is exactly the thing that I want here and here. We're not gonna do A and B. It's just gonna be a, we're doing this, we're doing that. I'm making the decision here. I'm making the decision there. I'm not, over analyzing anything. Now that's perfect, Brian.

Brian: That's not always me, but I'm just saying at my best. that's how I operate. And. If you don't know much about music production, there is so many decisions to be made, so many decisions to be made and things that you can regret later on. So that's why it's so hard to not let this hit you in music production because there is, what guitar are we gonna use?

Brian: how thick is the pick gonna be on the guitar? What strings should we use? What brand? What gauges, what pickups in the guitar? What pedals should we use? What amp should we use? Which cab should we use? Which mic should we use on the cab? Don't even get me into drums 'cause I'm a drummer.

Brian: I'll talk drums all day long. what should the shells be made of? What heads should we use? What thickness of heads? What [00:11:00] sort of symbols? What size of symbols? What sort of mics? Where should the mics be placed? How deep should the kick mic be in the kick drum?

Brian: should the room mics be placed I could go way too long on this, just trying to make a damn point. And that point is there are a billion decisions to be made in my background and so many people can sit and endlessly tweak for the rest of her life trying to make the perfect thing.

Brian: and sometimes actually all the time, there is no perfect answer. If there is no right or wrong, we live in this world as creatives where we want everything to be this black or white, yes or no, it is perfect or it's not. And we don't realize that we live in gradients, and I don't even know if it's gradients.

Brian: Gradients implies a gradual left to right bad to good gradient. And I think in creativity it's more of like a 360 view where there is no bad side or good side. It is literally just the perception that you have as a creative. And your own taste. And many times as freelancers, we are hired because we have good taste.

Brian: The client hires us because they like the work that we do. They like the websites that we put out with the brands we create. They like the copy that we write. they like the music that we produce or the music We mix our master. [00:12:00] They like all these things that we do, and yet we don't trust ourself to just continuously put that sort of stuff out into the world with minimal effort because you've, spent your 10,000 hours already.

Brian: I'm not talking to the absolute beginner freelancer. By the way, the six Figure Creative podcast is not for the absolute beginner at all, I'm just saying in this episode, you've already put your 10,000 hours. That's who I'm talking to here.

Brian: And when you put your 10,000 hours in, you've just gotta trust that when a decision comes up, you know how to make that decision quickly because you've seen it a billion other times. That gut feel that you have is the right decision.

Brian: So I wanna give you some action items to kinda leave on. So you have some, things to do here. But before I do that, I wanna give one caveat, 'cause this is an important caveat when it comes to the conversation around efficiency versus productivity versus creativity and trying to save time and all the things I've talked about so far, there is one big caveat and that is you still have to innovate and improve what you do. It can be very easy to go so far the other way where you're like, man, Brian sounds like a smart guy sometimes I'm gonna do exactly what he says. And you become the most efficient freelancer and you do things the fastest.

Brian: You're able to reduce your rates to where no one can compete with you because you're so efficient, but you earn more than everyone else, [00:13:00] despite the fact that you have slightly lower rates than everyone, and you're in a really good place and you're making tons of money. Great. Awesome. Amazing. Good for you.

Brian: The problem with that is at a certain point you will stagnate. You'll stop getting better. I experienced this. I went through a long period where I was so focused on efficiency. I didn't improve at all, and so I had to step back and essentially reinvent myself, and I had to do that multiple times throughout my career.

Brian: So you have to still innovate and develop new, sounds and music or design styles, stay on top of the trends while also kind of shifting them to your own vibe or design style or whatever it is that you do. We all have to still innovate and improve. We cannot stagnate.

Brian: So again, efficiency is not a black or white. Yes or no. It's still a gradient, just like creativity, but it's something to keep in mind when you go down this journey of becoming more efficient and spending less time fulfilling than the next person.

Brian: So, Action items. I got three action items here for you, like a good Baptist preacher. Action item number one is. Track your time and compete with yourself or appear. So there's a ton of things you do in any project that you work on. You do it over and over and over again. You do it a ton, right?

Brian: For every project, start with the most time consuming thing and start timing yourself and find ways to speed it up, make it [00:14:00] faster, make faster decisions. But basically just tracking your time over time. How fast can you do this thing? In my world, it was, drum editing.

Brian: if you don't know who I am, by the way, I'm a producer. I did heavy metal, artists. I did multiple top, billboard artists and, made a good living doing heavy metal in Nashville, Tennessee, which is surprising mainly because bands came from all over the world. they weren't from Nashville, that's for sure.

Brian: But. Drum editing for metal bands is very challenging. Think very fast. Drums, a lot of double bays, blast beats and, drum fills and just crazy stuff. A lot of syncopated beats and weird, I don't even know how to speak drum anymore.

Brian: I haven't touched a drum set in years. However, because of how complex it was, it would take four fucking ever. So I developed a lot of systems around improving my drum editing skills. So everything from. Getting a custom keyboard with 20 like macro keys on it, that I could assign those macro keys to different shortcuts in pro tools and create a better workflow for my left hand so that I'm able to always have my right hand on my mouse and always have my left hand on the left side of the keyboard and don't have to cross over at all.

Brian: When you're editing drums, that stuff really adds up. And so I remember when it used to take four [00:15:00] hours to do drum edits, I got it down to like an hour and a half, and that was for every song I would do, we would do 5, 6, 7, 10 songs at a time. You can see in one project how much that can add up. That's why I started there.

Brian: So start timing yourself on those, repeated tasks you do over and over again, starting with the longest ones and find ways to speed it up, make faster decisions, incorporate shortcuts, programs, macro keys, other software, or even cut corners sometimes. Ethically, obviously not an unethical cutting of corners, but like an ethical cutting of corners and well, here's what I mean.

Brian: There were times where we're doing something we're taught to do because that's just the way you do it, and you realize that step doesn't even matter. You can just cut it out and maybe there is some small consequence to it, but in the greater picture, the bigger picture, it ultimately didn't matter and there were so many of those in audio, there are so many like nerdy audio engineering rules that I blatantly ignored I didn't care about because I couldn't hear a difference.

Brian: And it was a waste of my time in my head. So I just, cut those corners to make myself more efficient and save time on things that I think actually impacted the records, because remember this, the client is paying for an outcome in my background. It's a record that they're stoked, with, [00:16:00] they can release to the world, and their friends and peers, gain fans and ultimately make themselves feel better about themselves.

Brian: That was kinda the outcome I provided, right? They're not paying for your time. They're not paying even for your service. They're paying for the outcome. So if the time you've saved or the corners you cut make no difference to the outcome, then just keep stacking those time savings up, rinse, repeat for every little thing that you do that's repetitive over and over again.

Brian: If.

Brian: Action Item number two is start putting a cap on how much time you can spend doing each thing. There's a law of Parkinson's law. Maybe you know what this is, maybe you don't, the Parkinson's law is basically work expands to fill the amount of time available, that you've given it, right?

Brian: So if you've given it a week, you will take a week to do it sometimes more. Even if that task only takes an hour, When you give yourself a cap on much time you spend on something, you will make it actually work. And so that allows you to say, I'm only gonna spend two hours on this thing. I'm only gonna spend two hours on it. Anything past that point, I know it's gonna be a waste of time. It's gonna get diminishing returns.

Brian: And generally, and this is a secret hack that I use all the time, generally finishing it faster and saying it to the client for feedback is almost [00:17:00] always more effective because then I get direct words from the client about what they want versus me endlessly tweaking in a cave by myself with no outside input.

Brian: Trying to make the best guess of what the client might want. while, Not getting any input from them, and then me trying to make it perfect before I send it their way, because I'm afraid to send it their way because I'm afraid of what they might say to me. Never works out. I have all the time sent unfinished, imperfect things to my clients to get real life feedback, even caveating, Hey, this is a really rough mix.

Brian: This is a really rough version. Just gimme your thoughts on these three elements. Tell me if I'm even in the right direction, the right universe. Get the feedback, make the changes, then send a better mix. So number two, again, just to reiterate, is start putting a cap on how long you're allowed to spend doing things.

Brian: I mean, Starting with the things you struggle with the most, the things that you know, you spend too much time doing. And then action item number three is keep track of your DPH, your dollars per hour and money per hour. This is obviously for project-based pricing, and my God, you probably wouldn't have gotten that far in this episode if you were charging per day or per hour because who cares about efficiency when you're just charging per day or per hour, right?

Brian: It still does matter to some extent because if you spend a. Three weeks doing something and charging your client for three weeks worth of [00:18:00] time, where it might take someone else a week to do it, the clients are gonna start realizing that you're just really slow and you're overcharging. So even for hourly price freelancers, this stuff does matter, but it's really effective for flat rate freelancers because when you become more efficient, you get to capture all the upside of that time savings.

Brian: That means if you get paid four grand for a project, instead of taking 40 hours, it takes you eight hours. You get all that extra time back, all in your pocket. If you can decide on the next project, maybe I'll do it for a little less. I'll do 3,500 bucks just 'cause I know I wanna win that project and I'm gonna do it in less time than the next person.

Brian: I'm gonna still make a ton of money per hour and I'm gonna be happy. But if you track this, kind of gold number, dollar per hour, this is something I obsessively tracked. You can just keep it in a simple spreadsheet. or a Notion doc or whatever you're into, and it should just be the start date of the project, the end date of the project, the client name, the hour spent, and the money earned.

Brian: And then you can make a little formula for dollars per hour, or you can calculate it manually yourself. Here's why you measure this. If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get improved. the simple act of stepping on the scale every day makes it easier to lose weight.

Brian: Just like if I don't skip on the scale for six months, I will almost certainly weigh [00:19:00] more. oh, I would bet a million dollars. I'll way more, but I weigh myself every morning the same exact time, around 5:50 AM 5 52, sometimes from being lazy It's the same in your business with all the metrics that you want to track. It's the reason I have a meeting with my bookkeeper every month to talk over all my income and expenses. we had an episode back on episode

Brian: 3 32. The seven must track metrics that will make you more money in 2025. was a good episode. Where I talk through dozens of metrics that I track on a daily basis because I want to measure those so that I can manage those things.

Brian: But if you struggle with efficiency and perfectionism, tracking your time on things and actually seeing the progress on your dollar per hour that you are earning, not only is that gratifying to see that I'm being more efficient, I'm earning more per hour. I'm a real business owner now. I'm taking this seriously.

Brian: It also allows you to start cutting away the wasted time on projects and you start to see that hey, clients are still happy. The end result actually is better now, surprisingly better when I spend less time. And I think we all inherently know that. I just, know that the times in my past where I've spent so much time trying to perfect something and it is [00:20:00] always 10 times worse where it's like this new version is way worse than version one or version 10 is worse in version six because we've just overdone it. We instinctively know this, but we still keep doing it. So this is my episode today, my soapbox episode, to challenge you to try to stop that vicious cycle so that you don't spend 40 damn hours, 40 hours on something that should take you less than eight.

Brian: That's all I got for you today. So as always, if you struggle with this, we are happy to help.

Brian: Just go over to six figure creative.com/coaching. Fail the short application. We'll chat, see if it's a good fit. But the way we help specifically is around client acquisition for the most part. And it sounds like efficiency. Fulfillment is not a huge part of client acquisition, but this is something we help with because anytime we're working with a client, we work with 'em on their pricing and their packaging and this time audit that I talked about, and we spot these inefficiencies in what you're doing and try to solve those before you move forward.

Brian: Charging way too much for something because you have to, because you have to earn what you want per hour. So this is one of the many areas that we help in to make sure you're not trying to carry over really bad habits before we start ramping up new clients in your business. So go to six figure creative.com/coaching.

Brian: Fill out the short application. We'll create a full [00:21:00] client acquisition roadmap for you. We'll pitch it to you if you love it. We will work with you until you want to cancel. It's month to month. you don't have to sign a contract for long term stuff or anything. It's just month to month.

Brian: And, uh, that's all I got for you today. So if you have any questions, need anything YouTube comments or a fine place to be, I guess. otherwise, I will see you next week on the six Figure Creative Podcast.