Why The Most Talented Freelancers Sabotage Their Own Progress

371. Be OK With Sucking Again

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Brian: [00:00:00] This episode's from my real Pros,

Brian: the ones who are actually good at what they do, the ones who are like top of the game, the masters of their craft, someone who's been so good at something for so long, people actually look up to you. If that is you. This episode's for you, because I wanna talk about a pitfall that you have likely already fallen into.

Brian: You've been good at your craft for so long. You cannot possibly stand the idea of sucking at something again, and so you end up avoiding crucial things that can make or break your business.

Brian: Or just make or break your life. get into this cycle, and honestly, if you're not even a mastercraft, you're just good at what you do. You can still relate to this. you open new tech, something that you know, you've been needing to do, like a CRM or something. You feel dumb at some point because it's complicated.

Brian: You close it off, you tell yourself that you don't really need it yet. You can worry about this later. And you know, it's a lie. You know? It's a lie because you know you actually need a thing, You're not lazy. So what is it? It's generally an ego protection mechanism of some sort where you, want to avoid the discomfort of being bad again and you just can't stand being bad at something again because you've just been so good. everything you touch turns to gold.

Brian: You're always used to being the best. My question is, when was the last time you were [00:01:00] a noob? When was the last time you were actually batted something?

Brian: We build these like moat of excuses around us when we're, again, masters at something and we're trying something brand new. You say you're not tech savvy. You say you're too busy with client work. You say you are a perfectionist. You say you'll outsource something.You'll outsource it now. You'll outsource it later.

Brian: You do outsource it, which we'll talk about all that. you say I'm a creative, not a business person. Or you say, I don't wanna sound salesy, or you don't wanna look desperate. These are all things that I hear in the world that we are, which is like helping with client acquisition and marketing.

Brian: but there's a lot of other areas that this shows up. This is also how you get stagnant in one area where you refuse to adapt because the new things that you have to do to adapt are scary. You're not a natural at them.

Brian: You suck at them. You're a new again, and so you never get good at the shit you have to get good at in order to reach your goals. Whether that is you need to get more clients, whether that is you have to update your sound, update your vision, update your portfolio, update how you do something, how you operate.

Brian: your work is starting to show its age, and now you're not showing up anymore in a modern way.

Brian: And another way of looking at this is everyone's got someone in their mind that they look up to.

Brian: and if you think about that person for a second, you want something that they have that you [00:02:00] don't have.

Brian: And that's how a lot of people feel. A lot of people want something that other people have. But you think about it. Logically, very few people are willing to put in the work that that person did to get there. I think Alex Ramzi said something like, everyone's jealous of what someone has, but they're not jealous of what they had to do to get there.

Brian: It's probably a better way of looking at that, and I say on this stupid sign over my left shoulder is, it takes more than passion.

Brian: Everyone has the passion to do something, but very few people are actually going to put in the work to get there. It takes more than passion. It takes more than creativity. It takes more than vibes. You have to suck before you can be great at something, and it's been so long.

Brian: Again, I'm talking to you, the person who's great at what you do. It's been so long since you've been a noob. It's been so long since you've sucked at something that you've forgotten what it feels like to suck. But you know, you have to suck at something before you'll be great at it.

Brian: So there's a mantra by somebody who's, been on this podcast,

Brian: 104, way back in the day. This is back in 2019. The episode's called The Recipe for Platinum Records Number One Hits and a Seven Figure Income with Seth Mosley.

Brian: If you don't know Seth, he has been songwriter of the year, producer of the year dozens of number one songs He's won multiple Grammys. And his mantra for himself and [00:03:00] everyone in his company, full circle music is dare to Suck. That's something that stuck with me over the years.

Brian: Dare to Suck. And the mantra is that because. Seth has embraced this. He is okay with sucking at something, trying something new, going into a new path where he's venturing into new uncharted territories where he sucks again at something. wants his team to know that they don't have to be perfect, that they can show up imperfect, that they can try something.

Brian: As long as they're trying their damnest to something, if they suck at it, as long as they're improving and making small progressions, that's okay.

Brian: It's being okay with being bad at something.

Brian: And when you can do that, you can start proving to yourself that you can learn or do new shit. You can start to round yourself out As a freelancer, You're not so deep in one area where you're amazing, you have this long, deep column of skills as a creative and just a tiny little shallow t without the,T-shaped freelancer or the full stack freelancer.

Brian: We have a, episode series on this where I talked about.

Brian: The five sets of skills every freelancer should be improving. It's a two part series, episode 235, and episode 236. The full stack freelancer, part one and part two, that's the thing. they call it a T-shaped whatever, T-shaped developer, T-shaped designer, T-shaped entrepreneur, T-shaped athlete.

Brian: You have [00:04:00] one deep set of skills that you're amazing at, and then a bunch on the side that you're okay at. And the better you could be at a lot of different things, the better you're going to be as an entrepreneur because the second you decided to accept money for your creative skills, you became a business owner whether you want to be or not.

Brian: if you want a better, healthier business that you could run for longer, one that doesn't eeat, weight your soul over time. This is the episode for you. So if you've never heard of this before or you're new here at Six Figure Creative. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: This is episode Wow. This podcast has been around in one shape or form since like 2017. And the last few years, we've grown to a team of around 10 or 11 people from all around the world with very diverse backgrounds, lot of different influences from a lot of different people. In this company, we have multiple people who have grown seven in multi seven figure businesses, people who have been heads of marketing at software as a service companies or SaaS companies. And so we have a lot of different perspectives. Not only that, I have a lot of different influences from different schools of marketing and different industries that I bring to this podcast.

Brian: so my goal is to take a lot of information from a lot of different people in this company and from other industries. Distill it down to what works for freelancers and bring it back to you. So you have diverse [00:05:00] inputs and you're not stagnating, only looking at other designers, only talking to other producers, only talking to other videographers, only talking to other copywriters and saying, oh, this is how you do your thing.

Brian: I'm gonna do exactly like you, because here's the secret. Most freelancers have no idea what they're doing. And by looking just to your left and just to your right, you have what we call an inbred business. No diversification, stagnant gene pool. And that's what this podcast tries to do, is to help you diversify.

Brian: Your business gene Pool. So let's get into this. So I've got some things I wanna talk about today. excuses that you make to yourself because you hate being a newb again.

Brian: And these are excuses I've either made myself or that I've seen a million times because at this point we have over 250 clients, probably lifetime, over 300 clients, that we've worked with, helping them with marketing, client acquisition, sales, pricing, packaging, whatever, whatever they need help with around that.

Brian: And in this journey of helping this many people, we've just seen all the excuses. We see all the ways people lie to themselves. And when you lie to yourself, the only person you're hurting is yourself.

Brian: And the first one I talk about is one that I see probably the most often with creatives is this excuse you say I'm just not tech savvy. That's the quote that I [00:06:00] wrote down. I'm just not tech savvy, I'm technically illiterate. And what that really means when I see someone and say that or hear someone say that is, I don't wanna feel stupid.

Brian: Fumbling through new software, something I'm not really good at. And so I avoid it and I just make the excuse, and I am not tech savvy. But this shows up in a lot of different ways. It shows up when you are, specifically working with new website builders. So some of you, That's very common when we come across. you've just decided you're gonna use Squarespace.

Brian: And so maybe you want to use something a little more robust. Maybe you want to use something like go high level, which is what we recommend people use. Maybe you're using something like WordPress and you're tying some things together there. Maybe you wanna use webflow 'cause it has more fancy features or framer or whatever it is that you're using.

Brian: So you open up the dashboard, you get overwhelmed with all the options that are there, and all the buttons and all the dials and all the things you could do. And none of it works like Squarespace because Squarespace sucks. Youimmediately feel lost. You close the tab,

Brian: tell yourself this is too advanced. I don't really need it right now, my website's fine.

Brian: And the reality is you just hate feeling like a clueless beginner.

Brian: So you just say, I'm gonna stick with Squarespace or Link Tree if that's what you have. My God, we need help. But that's one area it shows up a lot, you need a robust [00:07:00] website builder. The reason we recommend go high level is because it has. All the features that you would ever need, we run our entire business off of it.

Brian: And this is actually what we give our clients. We build out all the funnels, all the pages, all the automations, everything for them, and give it to them, just to help alleviate some of the overwhelm because it is a truly a robust tool. There's a lot that goes with it,

Brian: But it opens up so many opportunities for tying things together. That's something like simple Squarespace can't do. The second area that shows up is like email marketing platforms when it comes to tech You've maybe have heard on the podcast how good an email list can be, how powerful it can be.

Brian: You listen to back in episode 343 called The Secret Weapon for Six Figure Freelancers Email marketing, and you're like, great, I'm gonna get into email marketing. I'm gonna sign up for ConvertKit, or Active Campaign or Mailer Light. Or go High level again is what we, use with our clients.

Brian: And so you get in there and you start to realize there's so many things you have to set up in here. I need to learn automations. I need to know what a trigger is. I need to set forms about my site to capture things. I need to have incentives for people to actually join my mailing list in some way, shape or form.

Brian: And then you just hit this mounting sense of overwhelm much like you probably did the first time you opened up whatever software you work out of for your creative field. So [00:08:00] like I know my background in Pro Tools, the first time I ever opened Pro Tools, I'm Googling stupid stuff like how to change the tempo.

Brian: I'm an absolute beginner, an absolute noob. Just the dumbest things, I dunno how to do. But I just learned it. Some of you in Figma, some of you in

Brian: Adobe products, they all have a steep learning curve and you learn them because that's what you do. That's what you use every day for your craft, and many of those softwares are infinitely more complex. than something like JHL,then something like active campaign.

Brian: But again, you just lie to yourself. You say, email is not that important. I shouldn't do this. I can do this later. I guess because it's easier than admitting to yourself that you just dunno what you're doing and that you have to Google one thing at a time. Figure out one problem, one thing at a time. I'll tell you one quick secret.

Brian: I don't even Google anymore. I just use chat BT for everything. The second I have a question, I just use chat GBT. The second I have a problem, I just use chat, GBT. And the reason is. I can write a full question and it gives me a full answer. I don't have to search through any articles. I can use voice to text and I can just brain dump whatever I'm thinking, whatever problem I'm coming up against, whether it's tech or some other thing, and it'll gimme a solution.

Brian: It's actually really good with tech use version, uh, O three, I think is the best word, to actually search articles and help, desk stuff and search through all the crap [00:09:00] of the, software to find you the answer.

Brian: But bottom line is this, if you, stay stuck in tech, if you say you're always not a tech person, if you refuse to be bad at this, then you are going to be stuck doing manual work that drains your time, that sucks your soul away. You don't have something as basic as a CRM that operates and helps you land more clients.

Brian: You're gonna miss out on clients that you could have landed where you actually following up because you had a good CRM in place and you're actually following up with people. You're gonna miss out on automations that could free up more time so that you could focus on actually being a better creative while those things are still being done, instead of those things not being done and you just wanted to be a better creative, you can build a business that actually grows without you doing every damn thing in it.

Brian: Or even worse than this, you just end up hiring people who do the things for you,

Brian: which makes you dependent on them and usually disappointed because they didn't even know what you wanted. You just knew that they were technically savvy. And we'll talk more about this in a minute. But the, I'm just not tech savvy. Excuse is something that holds so many freelancers back because the part of the brain you have to utilize to run tech is not necessarily the same that you need to have to be creative.

Brian: And actually those can be at odds to be with each other. Where if I'm ever in the point where. I need to be [00:10:00] creative. I cannot work on tech, and I completely acknowledge that, separate the two. But I'm very tech savvy. I'm also very creative, and I have worked both sides of my brain or both of those muscles, and you can too.

Brian: The question is, not whether or not you're tech savvy. It's how good are you at just figuring the fuck out? You hit a problem. Instead of just giving up saying, okay, that's a problem. I'm going to Google this, or I'm just gonna chat JBT this or Gemini this, or whatever your IF choice is. They all basically do the same thing.

Brian: Cool. I solved that problem. Here's the next problem. Anything you were learning, no matter what is just a skill where you're gonna hit a roadblock and you have to solve a problem. You're gonna hit a roadblock, you have to solve a problem, gonna hit a roadblock, have to solve a problem. That's how you learned your creative pursuit, that you love to do the thing you're passionate about.

Brian: That's how you learn all this techy shit. You don't wanna learn, but you have to in order to do the stuff that you want to do. Here's the next excuse that I hear a lot. We hear this from clients when they go away for too long or they're not turning in work or they're not actually taking action towards the things that we agreed together. When we first start working with someone, we,create a whole roadmap, a whole plan for them that they agreed to, and they're like, this is the stuff I actually know I need to do and I will do it.

Brian: And we set deadlines and we [00:11:00] set expectations on both sides. And some clients, they just disappear. It happens. Life gets in the way we reach out and the excuse we tend to hear is, I'm quote, Too busy working on client work, but the iron is, they actually hire us to help them get more clients, and the reality is they're not actually buried in client work.

Brian: They're bearing themselves in work that they already know how to do, so they never have to actually be a beginner again. Never have to do the stuff that's scary, that's uncomfortable, that's hard. That stretches them, that pushes them, makes them feel like a noob again. And if you dive in and you look at the numbers, the thing is they actually have capacity.

Brian: They can take more clients. and we all know this, When working on creative work, there is no done. There is no finished.

Brian: There is merely good enough and good enough is not clear finish line. It is only a spectrum.

Brian: And in many industries, especially my background in music production, there was a point of diminishing returns. And the first hour of me mixing a song, massive improvements, the second hour of me mixing a song, moderate improvements, the third hour of me mixing a songs, minimal improvements, the fourth hour of me mixing the same song, microscopic improvements, the fifth hour of me mixing a song, probably [00:12:00] no improvements if not going backwards.

Brian: the problem is I probably should have stopped after three hours. But if I'm procrastinating on something I want to do, which is the creative work, I'll end up working the four or 5, 6, 10 hours on that because it's comfortable. It's kind of fun. I'm trying a bunch of shit that doesn't really matter.

Brian: The client would've been pleased 10 hours ago, but I'd rather do this than all the stuff that I know I'm supposed to do, but I'm bad at it, so I don't want to do it because I can't face myself being a new again. And so I will bear myself in the shit I want to do in order to avoid the stuff. I don't wanna do a tale as old as time,

Brian: And the place that shows up the most is when you know there's something extremely important that you've been putting off. And the more important that thing is, the more crucial it is to you, the more you tend to throw yourself into work you wanna do while you're avoiding the thing you're supposed to do.

Brian: and if you keep doing this, you're never gonna make time to work on your business. You've heard me say this on the podcast a million times. If you've been here a long time, if you're new, maybe this is the first time you've probably heard this before. You have to work both on your business and in your business.

Brian: Working with clients or working on client work is what we call in the business, it is fulfilling on the work you're paid to do. The problem with that is you can't just do that or [00:13:00] else you avoid all the shit you have to do as a business owner. Like I said, the second you started taking money as a freelancer, you are now a business owner, and businesses have responsibilities.

Brian: There's like 10 roles that pop up the second you start taking money, and most freelancers avoid all those roles, but real entrepreneurs, they work on the business, which is working on those other roles to make all those other roles actually work well.

Brian: but because you lie to yourself that you're too busy, you never actually make progress and you ironically actually have less time now because you're always in reaction mode as a freelancer because you never fix the root cause of all the shit that's taking up your time.

Brian: I'll give you one basic example. You spend 10 hours onboarding a client and you actually enjoy that part.

Brian: Because you get to start to set the vision and figure out what you're gonna do with this client. It's all fun.

Brian: And then you bury yourself in the work all while avoiding working on a better onboarding system. One that takes half the time, a third of the time, one that cuts out all the wasted time. Client interactions that don't actually add any value. Client interactions maybe detract from the overall project because they're just wasting time or asking dumb questions because you could have set up a better onboarding process or you could have come prepared better, and because of that, you're wasting 5, 6, 7 hours every single time you onboard a client because you never worked on the root [00:14:00] cause problem of what's costing you time.

Brian: Another problem with this is you end up burnt out because you are always reacting. You are always in a fragile state as a freelancer.

Brian: and it can quickly burn you out because you're making no progress and nothing is worse as a freelancer or business owner or just human being is to work so hard for so long for something and see so little to show for it. And I know people watching this or listening to this podcast right now have been in a situation where they've worked their entire lives striving for something and that it's just always been just out of reach.

Brian: And if you're to look at yourself and say, have I truly done everything I should be doing? And my business on my business in order to be successful. If you truly ask yourself that and you face yourself in the mirror where only you're asking yourself, there's no one else to lie to. You're only lying to yourself at this point.

Brian: You would, be hard pressed to say that yes, you've tried everything, that you've worked as hard as you can. You've,rounded out all the skill sets you need to round out as a freelancer in order to be successful for the long term,

Brian: But if you're lying to yourself and you tell yourself that you're actually working hard, deep down, you know that you're just hiding from the real work that you have to do, the stuff you need to do.

Brian: Now, again, this goes back to that excuse of I'm too busy working on client stuff, right? [00:15:00] That's the excuse. But honestly, a lot of this ties into

Brian: a lot of the other things I talk about today.

Brian: Just like this next excuse you've told yourself again and again, I'm a perfectionist. And if you translate this to yourself, it's,if I can't do it perfectly, I don't wanna try it all. And the,subconscious voice to yourself the thing that you won't,admit to yourself is it's better to avoid than be seen struggling.

Brian: And it's that ego protection, you've been the man or the woman, you've been so good at the thing.

Brian: Maybe you've won words, maybe you have the accolades to prove that you're great at what you do. And maybe you tell yourself you're this good because you're a perfectionist, because you're detail oriented,

Brian: And so you think you should be perfect at everything else you do. And if you can't be perfect at it, you just won't do it. You don't wanna be seen as somebody who's less than, who's noob, and that's your ego showing up.

Brian: And I see this show up in two different areas when we're working with clients. One is in content creation, so some of our clients, we do content marketing,

Brian: and this is common in certain scenarios where maybe you don't wanna spend money on ads or you don't have the budget for ads, even though we give a budget to our clients.

Brian: But even if we're doing paid ads, we still have to create the ads, which is content. And so the perfectionist does this. They write the same post or script or email, like 15 different times.

Brian: They never end up actually publishing it. [00:16:00] and you keep putting it off and putting it off and making excuses saying it's not ready. But what you really mean is you're just afraid that it won't land, or people will see you try and fail in public. The reality is, if it's bad. Most people are not gonna see it. No one's really paying attention. Worst case scenario, if you think about it's actually no one will see it.

Brian: yeah, you'll feel like a failure, but we will have at least learned something from it, which is that message just didn't land. No one cared. Zero views, zero clicks.

Brian: And the person who put out three horrible posts or three horrible ads is infinitely further along than the person who did zero because the person who did the three have learned something.

Brian: Because again, anyone I ask this question to will agree. Do you have to be bad before you're good? In most cases, yes, you have to be bad before you're good. Now, some people, they have skills that translate well. For example, I flew one of our team members, Dennis, here to Nashville from New Zealand, because we're working on a lot of marketing stuff together and we just need a lot of like fast feedback loops and interaction for this.

Brian: He's here for the next couple weeks and

Brian: he's played tennis before. you know, I played tennis a little bit back in the day, but my sport is pickleball. I like pickleball a lot, and [00:17:00] I, was playing him against pickleball and I, feel like I'm pretty damn good at it. I rarely lose and he beats me first game, second game, third game, fourth game.

Brian: I haven't beaten him yet. I'll beat him soon. he was a natural. You could say he wasn't bad before he was good, but then he put tons and tons of hours into tennis. that's where you start to say oh, he's a natural at it. The reality is he put a lot of time into tennis.

Brian: He sucked at tennis before he was good at it, and that skillset translated really well to pickleball.

Brian: When I take him out to the golf course, that'll be different. He will suck at that. I will beat him at golf.

Brian: But in general, you have to be bad before you're good. And content creation is one of those areas. The second place this shows up, again, we're talking about the perfectionist. This shows up when you're launching anything new. And I guess this kinda goes back to content or ads, so it's just kind of redundant, but it's still worth just talking about from this angle.

Brian: You might be launching literally anything instead of testing it in the real world where it might actually flop or realistically just be ignored.

Brian: In reality, you cannot possibly know when something isright in a vacuum. Most screeners try to do all these things in a vacuum. You have no external feedback. If you do get feedback from somebody, it's usually a friend or a colleague, someone who's not a real person who would ever hire you.

Brian: But [00:18:00] by putting something outta the world, getting real feedback from real humans who would actually potentially hire you, or the real feedback being no one cares about this, that is real learning that you can use to make adjustments. And those adjustments can be used to course correct and course correction over a long enough time horizon can lead to massive gains.

Brian: But people continuously end over perfecting everything that they do, and they confuse polish with progress. They delay feedback so they don't have to improve.

Brian: you end up trying to get something that's absolutely flawless instead of something that's actually functional or going to work to some degree.

Brian: and you end up missing out on not only making progress, but missing out on just opportunities because you're so busy, making sure everything looks perfect, everything's impressive. Again, the ego is at play here, while other people are out there doing the actual work, putting themselves out there, being vulnerable, being willing to fail or suck in public, daring to suck as Seth Mosey would say.

Brian: And those people are the ones making money. Those are the ones making progress. Those are the ones reaching their goals. Those are the ones with dozens of number ones and multiple Grammys and songwriter and producer for the year while you're over here, maybe just as good as them, but your perfectionism is holding you back.

Brian: All right. This,next one's a bit different than the other ones [00:19:00] because this is one I've seen enough times now to be concerned by it, and I've seen this backfire enough. And also I've,fallen for this one myself, but I haven't seen really, people talk about this. This is an excuse you give to avoid being bad at something and getting better at something.

Brian: You'll say, outsource that, or I'll get a friend or a family member to do that for me.

Brian: And it makes sense 'cause you're like, oh, I'm gonna double down on the things I'm good at and I'm going to pass off the things I'm bad at. But reality is if you translate this. To Brian speak, it's, I'm passing off core parts of my business to someone who has zero stake in my business.

Brian: And so you end up being coming dependent on people who don't have skin in the game, and they can hold things hostage for you, not because they're mean. Just because they're busy. They have their own life, they have their own problems, they have their own desires, they have their own goals. They have their own everything.

Brian: And because they have no stake in your business, there's no reason why they would ever rush whatever you need. An example would be like a website. This is where I see this a lot. You ask your cousin who used to do web stuff to build a site or your best friend. In my case, I had my best friend build my first website for my studio, and then you have to wait six months for something you don't even like, which in my case at least I [00:20:00] liked it.

Brian: But a lot of you, you.cousin builds your site, you don't even like it. It's ugly. It doesn't actually represent you. They got most things wrong,

Brian: but now you don't even know how to fix the damn thing. You don't even know how to adjust things or worse. This is what my mistake was. It was a hard coded website. my best friend's, a developer, and he hard coded a pretty good looking website, especially for back in the day when it was like 20 14, 20 15, and the problem was anytime I needed an update, let's add a song to the portfolio.

Brian: Let's update the headline. Let's change this type of font. I can't just go in like you can on a drag and dry builderand change those things. He had to go in and hard code those changes. And so it was basically like hostage by my own Idiocracy.

Brian: Back then there weren't as many options. Maybe Wix was around at the time that he built that, and that was what I did later on was rebuild the site exactly how he designed it in Wix, pixel for pixel, But many freelancers today don't have thisexcuse. It's not because the only option you have is a hardcoded website. Although I've seen that with our clients, and I have to say why, but it's more often than not that they're just not tech savvy. And so the solution they think is, oh I don't have the skill.

Brian: My cousin has the skill. I'll have him do it. So you think you're being [00:21:00] smart, you think you're outsourcing, you think you're saving time or money, but you can't even make basic edits to your site now without taking someone who ultimately doesn't care because they have their own problems.

Brian: And you don't have the skill to even do it if you had access to it. So you won't even know what to do if you had access to it yourself.

Brian: Next area is tech setup. And this goes for anything. this is not just website. This could be your funnel builder, your GHL account, which is kind of like all in one. It could be your email platform, anything that is a core part of your business that you don't understand.

Brian: That you're handing off to someone else is the wrong move a hundred percent of the time. If you don't know how a core part of your business works as a freelancer, you are fucking up. I dunno how else to say it. Sorry if that's mean. You are fucking up.Because when something breaks, you're stuck because you never learn how to run the things. And not only that, your progress is dramatically slowed down because you're at the whim of another human being.

Brian: And so you end up losing critical parts of your business that you have no control over. You delay growth in your business because you're constantly waiting on someone else to do something that you need to be done, and they have no real incentive to do it. even if you are paying them and outsourcing them, they're likely not gonna get it right because they don't understand your business to the level that you do.

Brian: They don't [00:22:00] understand your clientele to the level that you do, and you're essentially offloading ownership over massive parts of your business. To someone else before you even understand what you're doing yourself.

Brian: So how could you even know if they're doing it right? If you look at like the highest levels of business, multi, multi DECKA million, a hundred million billion dollar companies, the CEO of a billion dollar company can't possibly know all the things that he's handing off to other people.

Brian: And so you say that's how smart people run businesses, but the reality is they have people that they trust that know the specific thing that they're hiring out for or outsourcing to,

Brian: but freelancers don't have this. You don't have a trusted source within the organization to be the expert in that specific thing, Which means you have to have at least a little bit or decent amount of information about a lot of things.

Brian: I personally am a very well-rounded creative marketer. wouldn't even say T-shaped. I've got a few different deep areas that I've developed over the, 15, 16 plus years I've been an entrepreneur.

Brian: I am very much a generalist with a few specialties. And it's because I have this weird broken thing in my body where I want control [00:23:00] over a lot of things. And to me, control is understanding information. If I hand something off to someone else, I'm okay with that as long as they understand what they're doing and I know what success looks like for that person.

Brian: So at this point, I have 10 employees, so I know I'm not the one doing all the things in my business, and I'm not a micromanager. You can literally ask anyone. In my company, I do not micromanage. But I understand every single role in my company because I've done literally everything that every single person in my company has done.

Brian: I've done myself before I ever handed it off. I've had to learn those skills whether I wanted to or not. There are many things that I outsourced or hired internally for because Igenuinely do not wanna do it, but I know it's necessary and I did it myself and I learned it, and I got good enough at it to succeed.

Brian: So I know what success looks like and I know what the process looks like to eventually bring another person in on my team to do it for me, and they're usually better at it than I am. But they don't hold me hostage because I understand the process of replacing people if necessary. Now that's not a threat to any of my team by any means.

Brian: You guys are way better at it than I am, and I would be sad if anyone left, but it's truly, it's not a hostage scenario [00:24:00] here,

Brian: except for James. James could probably destroy me. that's my admin assistant that's been with me since like 2018. He's been promoted to like operations manager and has every login to every single thing in my entire business. That's true hostage scenario right there.

Brian: I got a couple more here. These are my two favorite. if I was a good podcaster, I would've said the last two are my favorite. Stick around at the end, but you're already here, so you know, it's kind of pointless to say that. Now.

Brian: I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this sentence. Quote, I don't want to sound salesy.

Brian: to an extent. I understand that because you see what all is on the internet today, and it's like salesy, it's cringe. It's like, God, everyone knows that, guy in front of the Ferrari or Lamborghini, it's like, what do I like more than my Lamborghini knowledge? That's what they think at when I think of marketing or sales. But the translation that I think this is whenever you're saying that to yourself is you don't know how to pitch yourself naturally.

Brian: So you'd rather pretend that it's a moral issue rather than a skill gap, because sales or marketing, I kinda lump those two together because most freelancers don't even really know the difference. But sales and marketing. is a set of skills, and those skills have a spectrum. You can be great at it, you can be awful at it,

Brian: [00:25:00] and instead of learning those skills, you end up saying, I don't wanna sound salesy, as if being salesy is a bad thing. It kind of is. I understand that, but you put it on thismoral pedestal, and that moral pedestal is

Brian: your excuse for not learning the skills.

Brian: And so this is how this plays out. You get on a sales call with your client or potential client, you explain your process, you do your whole discovery call thing. Some of you are good and you actually have like prepared things. Some of you just wing it all. Whatever the case is, if you were wing it you're really hurting yourself here.

Brian: Because you want it to sound natural. You don't want it to sound scripted. Whatever. fine. That's great.

Brian: You figure out what they need, but nine times outta 10 you stop short of actually inviting them to work with you. And your excuses are, I don't wanna pressure anyone. You think you're being chill.

Brian: You're not being salesy, you're being different than the other people, but really what's happening is you're hoping that they will offer to hire you without you ever having to ask, which brings me into the next area that shows up on that same sales call. When you're talking about money, you dance around pricing on the call, the entire call, hoping the client brings something up, or where yourThis is what most people do. You end up saying, cool. Awesome. I'll send you a proposal and we can chat about it later, or I'll follow up with a [00:26:00] proposal. 'cause you don't wanna talk about money I swear to God, if you say, well, I have to get a proposal together. I don't know what the pricing will be if that is you, you were fucking up.

Brian: Sorry if I sound harsh there. You were fucking up. And here's why. If your business is so complex that you have to get proposals, you better be charging 50 grand or more for your project. A lot of people, they have crazy complex pricing charging three grand, five grand, 10 grand. You cannot run a business like that if you cannot create modular pricing where you know, here's four building blocks of what a client might need from me.

Brian: And I know what each of those building blocks costs. I know what the deliverables are for those four building blocks and maybe there's a little bit of variability. You can always shape an offer with what we call up to language. this thing is this much money and includes up to x, up to this many days, this many hours, this many revisions for this flat price.

Brian: So if you can create modular pricing, then on any sales call, you can come up with a price on the fly by writing down the four things they need and what that price is gonna be. worst case scenario, you say this is about what it might cost, is that within your budget,

Brian: you think you're scaring them off. When you talk about [00:27:00] money,

Brian: you think you're being polite. You think you're being ful by not talking numbers on a call, and maybe in certain cultures that's the case, but all you're doing is delaying real conversations, allowing clients to ghost you, and you'll never learn anything. And so you end up writing proposals over and over again for people who aren't serious.

Brian: They don't wanna hire you anyways because you never found out on the call that the real reason they don't wanna hire you is because you're not actually offering something that they want. But you didn't have that discussion on the call because you never really even offered your services. You never even talked numbers.

Brian: You never got to the real bottom line of why they're not gonna hire you because you just hid behind a proposal.

Brian: And because of this, you end up getting ghosted by leads all the time.

Brian: And you're stuck in this freelance friend zone where you're being helpful, you're being pleasant, you're forgettable, and it's because you're attracting people just like you who avoid commitment. So your pipeline is filled with flaky leads just like you 'cause you're flaky as well. Because, quote, you don't wanna sound salesy.

Brian: Which brings me to the last one here, one of my favorites of excuses. You tell yourself because you hate being a noob again, you hate being a noob, but something, and that's quote, I don't want to look desperate. will translate this than the only way I know how to translate this. And that's just [00:28:00] my real talk. You are desperate.

Brian: Any client that hires us for client acquisition is desperate to some degree, but you would rather keep your Instagram feed. This perfect facade or whatever your equivalent of this perfect facade of, I am confident, I'm so busy, I don't need any clients. You'd rather do that than to make money and just to really reset the frame here.

Brian: Marketing is not desperation. Desperate marketing equals desperation.

Brian: Marketing is what every business on Earth does in order to get customers and clients except freelancers.

Brian: Because, this is the big reason why most freelancers don't do anything with marketing is they look to the left and the right, the top people in their industry. And those people, if they ever say how they're getting clients, it's a hundred percent word of mouth. because that's the case, you always expect yourself to be booked solid a hundred percent with word of mouth you consider yourself.

Brian: What I call like the white collar freelancer, where they are the best of the best or the top 1%. They have mastered their skillset and some of you have really, you've done that. But the problem is you might have peaked some of you, your peak might have been five, 10 years ago. You never updated how you operate, your stuff is showing its [00:29:00] age because you didn't wanna be bad at something.

Brian: Again, this excuse is showing up again and again. The consequences with not being bad at something. Being so adverse to sucking with, not daring to suck. You. Let your sound, your look, your style, your vibe, your designs, your videos, whatever it is, stagnate and get left in the dust.

Brian: And someone younger hung, or someone who was okay with sucking for a long time until they got great at something at your lunch.

Brian: Most freelancers do not stay booked solid a hundred percent of the time with word of mouth at any level. even at my peak, that was not me. There are seasons when I was booked up six months in advance, and there are seasons where I might be booked up three, four months in advance and I still might have a full three week gap with nothing in it.

Brian: And what do you do in these scenarios? You can either hope,hope, marketing, that someone will fill that gap. Someone will book you out, someone will come back again and hire you. Or you can do what businesses do and that's market your services so people know and remember that you exist. People can see your new updated portfolio, that you're not doing the same tired shit you did 10 years ago,

Brian: and the way you do that is by putting the right message in front of the [00:30:00] right person at the right time. That's marketing in a nutshell, and doing those three things the right way with good messaging, good targeting, consistency. It's not desperate. That is just sharing information about you you can be desperate as hell and still market your services and not look desperate

Brian: or. You can be afraid of looking desperate, not market your services, not get your calendar booked solid with word of mouth because you haven't had word of mouth. Fill your calendar for the last six months. Slowly become more and more desperate. Maybe six months, 12 months from now, you finally admit yourself.

Brian: I am so desperate. I'll do anything. And you come back to this podcast and you start actually following some of the stuff that I talk about on this podcast when it comes to client acquisition or marketing or sales, pricing, packaging offers.

Brian: after 12 months of pain and desperation, where it finally built up to where you're willing to make change, admit to yourself that maybe your ego can be set aside for a minute so that you can have a better business, so you can build your ego back up and be booked solid again.

Brian: Or you can just admit to yourself now that maybe you are a little bit desperate and you don't have to look desperate while you're marketing yourself. And that not being the absolute best top of the top [00:31:00] is still okay. Because one thing I've discovered after working with hundreds of freelancers and myself being at many levels of my career throughout the last 17 years.

Brian: There's always a client at your level. So maybe at thepeak of your career, at the top of the top, you are working with the top of the top artists, but as you've fallen down, there are still artists at your level. There's people coming up on their way to the top who can work with you. There are clients who have peaked themselves, who are working the waves down, who can work with you.

Brian: Might be that you're very beginning of your career and you haven't proven yourself. There are potential clients at the very beginnings of their career that haven't proven themselves. At every level. There is someone that you can work with, and weirdly enough, I've seen people who are awful at what they do, still find clients because there are clients who are out there who are awful, that no good freelancer wants to work with.

Brian: They're both scraping the bottom of the barrel together. Now, we don't work with those, but I'm just saying that at every level there is a client out there for you. And in order to get those clients, that is what marketing and client acquisition comes in. It is not magic, it is not voodoo, it is not desperate.

Brian: It is not salesy. It is literally just what every business does on earth except for [00:32:00] freelancers. The expectation here is that you should be booked solid for word of mouth, and the reality is you're not. Case in point, look at your calendar right now. How booked up are you?

Brian: So if you're sick of making these excuses to yourself, lying to yourself that you're not tech savvy, that you're too busy to work on client stuff, that you're a perfectionist, and that you can't do anything until it's perfect, you'll outsource something, you'll get your friend to do it. You don't wanna sound sales, you don't wanna look desperate.

Brian: You're tired of those excuses you're telling yourself and you wanna actually start making change.

Brian: then consider working with me and my team. We will create a whole plan for you. You can agree to do it or not. If you don't agree, we won't work with you, and that's fine. If you do agree to the plan, we'll work with you and we will hold your hand step by step, all along that plan.

Brian: on a month to month agreement where you can cancel any time fixing your client acquisition problems, having someone by your side who you can run ideas by, where you can get feedback on things.

Brian: Second, set of eyes on If this sounds at all interesting, just apply it, see if it's a good fit. Six figure creative.com/coaching is the link to apply. Fill out the short application. And we'll be in touch. So that's all I got for you this week. Just quick update. This episode is scheduled to Air

Brian: July 15th, which means last weekend I was in Iceland, which [00:33:00] is fun. I haven't been to Iceland since 2015. 10 years later. I'm looking forward to going back and I will have had a good time by the time this episode airs and I should be in Copenhagen right now. I think anyone in Copenhagen hit me up on Instagram and starting tomorrow.

Brian: I should be in Switzerland for the next couple weeks, so do a little travel, trying to get ahead of the podcast, but still do some episodes while I'm out there. But I'd like to get ahead when I can. I'm trying to get away from the summer heat. It's like been hot as hell in Nashville this week, and we're not even like in the, thick of summer yet.

Brian: Just a big heat wave. I think everyone in America's been dealing with this and, uh, going to some cooler countries for the summer is always a good thing. So if anyone has any wrecks for, what to see, what to do, and Copenhagen or Switzerland hit me up. I think I'll be in, Zurich Lake, Lucerne, zer, Vermont.

Brian: During my time there and, uh, looking forward to it Anyways, Hit me on Instagram, Brian Hood, H zero zero D is my Instagram handle.

Brian: And we'll chat. See you next week on the podcast. Peace.