Why You Should Ask Your Clients For Feedback After Every Single Project | The Infinite Clients Series

[00:00:00] Brian: Hello and welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host Brian Hood If this is your first time ever listening to the show First of all, hello, so glad you're having here. This podcast might be for you, might not be for you, but it is for you.

[00:00:10] Brian: If you are a freelancer who offers creative services and you want to make more money from those creative skills without selling your soul, that sounds like you, you might be in the right place. We'll find out for my returning or long time listeners or maybe old who just came back, we are wrapping up the final episode of a long ass series.

[00:00:25] Brian: It's like eight episodes series called the infinite clients series. And I'll explain it again just for anyone who's new. The concept of this series is what if we had such an amazing service with such an amazing experience, every single one of our clients.

[00:00:38] Brian: Referred another client to us, not only that, they refer another client to us and they kept coming back to us or if it's a recurring retainer kind of service that you offer, they just never cancel If that were the case, where every single client came back to you again and again and again, never cheating on you with another service provider, and every single client referred a new client to you, you essentially have infinite clients. You will always grow every single year. So [00:01:00] very hard thing to do,

[00:01:01] Brian: but something that if we could get it, who doesn't want that, right? A lot of times we talk a lot about marketing, which is wonderful, client acquisition. These skills are wonderful to have. It's something that we, most of us will always need to some degree because. Sometimes clients stop coming back to us through no fault of our own.

[00:01:14] Brian: Sometimes clients don't refer other people to us through no fault of our own. So it is an impossible goal to work towards, but it's not something that we should ever stop striving towards. And this episode is for you. If you've gone through this whole series and you've implemented all the that we've talked about in this series, all these wonderful, cool things that we've done in each of the episodes, like

[00:01:32] Brian: setting up a rock solid eight part client agreement or setting up the perfect five step client onboarding process

[00:01:38] Brian: or following those six bare minimum rules for solid client communication We're building that external brain that helps you get everything out of your brain into an external brain aka project management system Maybe listen to michael janda's episode where he talks about being a more likable person And you've been working on that because those are skills that need to be exercised Or maybe you just came from last week's episode where we talked about client boundaries, whatever it was, Whatever episode [00:02:00] you've listened to and implemented, think of this episode as the final step to tie it all together.

[00:02:04] Brian: because you don't just implement things and then move on with your life. You've got to actually see, how do we know if we actually did things any better? How do we know if we're actually improving? How do we keep getting better week after week, month after month, year after year?

[00:02:15] Brian: If you're like most freelancers, when you finish a project with a client, You just say, thanks, goodbye, thanks for your money. Hope you got what you wanted, goodbye. You might ask for a referral if you're a little more sophisticated, but I can almost guarantee that you do not ask for feedback from your clients.

[00:02:29] Brian: Either because you just don't know to, or because you're scared of what they might really say. it might be both. Now that you know you should ask for feedback, you may still be scared to do it.

[00:02:36] Brian: But because of this, because you're not gathering feedback from clients, and it doesn't sound sexy, it doesn't sound exciting, I promise you by the end of this episode you will have changed your mind, but because you're not getting feedback from your clients.

[00:02:46] Brian: couple things kind of have first is wounds can fester meaning if you have something that happened with a client Where they're wounded in some way whether they're unhappy with something or you said something that kind of irked them or whatever those things can fester and turn into Horrible [00:03:00] toxic relationships down the road and you didn't know there was even anything wrong in the first place Because you never asked for feedback.

[00:03:05] Brian: And so that wound just festered and they probably didn't come back to you They probably didn't refer people to you

[00:03:10] Brian: And you had no chance to fix it or make it right because you had no idea it was going on in the first place. The other issue problems in your business linger. Nothing really gets fixed.

[00:03:18] Brian: You have implemented a new onboarding process, is it any better for the client? It might be better for you, but is it better for the client? As freelancers, we tend to work on what's top of mind for us. If we've ever looked at like, what is our YouTube search history for like lifelong learners like me, where you're always trying to learn something new, we tend to just gravitate towards those things that are interesting to us or entertaining to us, fun to learn.

[00:03:38] Brian: and for many of us, it tends to be our creative skill. The thing that we Obviously are passionate about although the sign behind me should tell you otherwise it takes more than passion, right? but those are the things that we gravitate towards because they're interesting to us

[00:03:50] Brian: And if you never get feedback from your clients Then those things that you should actually be working on Never get pulled to top of mind

[00:03:56] Brian: because how could you ever know that you need to work on your client onboarding that the new one [00:04:00] you just implemented the new process you just implemented or those communication guidelines you you follow or any other number of things that you're working on right now. How do you know if it's actually better for the client without feedback?

[00:04:09] Brian: How do you know what needs to be improved? How do you keep that stuff top of mind? And no surprise, it is asking for feedback, not saying, Hey, can I get feedback? that's a loser's game. We have a specific way we ask for feedback, but not just that. We don't just gather feedback endlessly.

[00:04:22] Brian: We get the feedback and we actually utilize the feedback. To continuously improve, and that's the word I want to focus on for this episode, is continuous improvement. Continuous means we never stop. This is an infinite game.

[00:04:35] Brian: Some games, they're won or lost some games. When the game is done, you move on. But with freelancing, it is an infinite game. We never win. We never lose. I guess the only way we lose is if we give up and go back to a day job. But with an infinite game, we continuously improve over and over and over and over again for the rest of our lives.

[00:04:51] Brian: And when we get feedback directly from our clients. We know exactly what we need to be working on, what exactly needs to be improved. Because the people that are paying you will tell you [00:05:00] exactly what needs to be improved, exactly what you need to work on. And not only that, a lot of times they'll tell you how to fix it.

[00:05:06] Brian: every bit of feedback you get from clients that you implement, you get a little bit better. And a little bit better and a little bit better. And you will rapidly improve your overall client experience, which is what we want. Because if we are trying to get infinite clients, our experience has to be the best of the best.

[00:05:22] Brian: And the only way to get the best of the best is to get feedback from clients, fix those things and implement it so that the next client has a slightly better experience. And the next client has a slightly better experience. And so on and so on and so on ad nauseum. we want repeat clients and we want referrals.

[00:05:35] Brian: And the only way to do that is to have a perfect experience. so client feedback, yes, important, but before I even get into how we ask for it, what format, what things we ask, I want to actually introduce a concept that I haven't really talked about on this podcast before. It's one of those things that I vaguely heard about before in business, and it's one of those things that I feel like I really never.

[00:05:54] Brian: Fully understood until recently is the concept of a flywheel. You may have heard about Amazon's flywheel. I'm not gonna even get into [00:06:00] that I'm gonna try to even simplify it beyond this but a flywheel for those who don't know I'm just gonna give you a very crude example There's probably not even the perfect example, but I feel like it explains the concept of what this means a flywheel It's just something that spins faster and faster, and the more energy you put into it, the easier it is to maintain that speed.

[00:06:14] Brian: And the easy example for most of us is we can ride a bicycle. So if you've ever ridden a multi speed bicycle, and you put it on like too high or too low of a gear, wherever it's like really hard to pedal, you know that whenever you first start pedaling on that really difficult gear, that it's just hard to get going.

[00:06:28] Brian: takes a lot of strength to get that speed up. But with every rotation of the pedals it gets slightly easier. You're moving faster. And at a certain point, it becomes pretty easy to maintain for a very long amount of time. I think people have cycled hundreds of miles. I don't know. Like, You can go really far.

[00:06:44] Brian: I think that is actually the most efficient human powered mode of transport is a bicycle. for the reason of the flywheel. Once you get it up to speed, it's relatively easy to maintain. over a long timeline.

[00:06:54] Brian: And it's no different with you if you have an amazing service as a freelancer. So let's look at the flywheel for [00:07:00] the amazing freelancer. You get a client. That client has an amazing experience. That client tells all their friends about that amazing experience they had. Those friends then hire you. a new client.

[00:07:10] Brian: You give them amazing experience. They tell all their friends. those people hire you and you get another client.

[00:07:15] Brian: That's the flywheel of the amazing freelancer. That's the infinite client flywheel. Now if you have a product or service, now we have the antithesis of that. That is, you get a client, the client has a shitty experience, that client tells all their friends about that experience, now all those people actively avoid you and probably Beyond that, depending on how bad the experience was, they may actively tell their friends to avoid you.

[00:07:36] Brian: And now your reputation is trashed, which makes it way harder to get the next client. And when that client works with you, that client has a horrible experience. And then they tell their friends, don't work with this guy or girl. And then those people probably tell other people don't work with you. Now your reputation's trashed again.

[00:07:50] Brian: And so it's even harder to get your next client.

[00:07:52] Brian: And then eventually. You will give up freelancing forever because it's too hard. too inconsistent. The market's oversaturated.

[00:07:59] Brian: Do you see the [00:08:00] obvious difference between those two flywheels, the amazing infinite client flywheel and the horrible service freelancing flywheel of death with the good product or service? Every rotation of that flywheel gets easier and easier. And with the bad service or bad customer client experience, the flywheel gets harder and harder and slows down.

[00:08:19] Brian: And every rotation gets more and more difficult, if not impossible.

[00:08:23] Brian: That is a death spiral. That's not what we want.

[00:08:25] Brian: now, obviously, everything we talked about in this entire eight part series for Infinite Clients is something to make the experience for your clients better so that we avoid this death spiral. But how do we really know? How do we really know if we're improving?

[00:08:37] Brian: How do we really know what to work on? How can we measure whether or not we're doing better or worse?

[00:08:42] Brian: And that's where we implement the Feedback Flywheel. don't know what else to call it. The Feedback Flywheel. Sounds unsexy, but bear with me on this. Client hires you. You do what you're paid to do to the best of your ability. Whatever that is right now, and here's the important step you ask for feedback when you're done Matter of fact, you probably want to ask for feedback all along the way But you definitely want to ask for [00:09:00] feedback when you're done when the whole project's finished Then you implement the changes based on the feedback the client gives you And the goal is to improve the client experience so that gets gradually better.

[00:09:09] Brian: I'm sure this is no surprise to you so far, right? following along. And then the next client has a better experience, making it easier to get referrals and new clients. And you just repeat this forever the rest of your freelancing life. Now this is an important note. If you're doing this right, each rotation should get easier.

[00:09:26] Brian: That's a flywheel.

[00:09:27] Brian: if it's not getting easier, you might have a death spiral. A death spiral is just where you're going to have super inconsistent business. It's going to be dramatic feast or famine. It's going to be clients never coming back to you. Clients not referring others to you. It's a horrible place to be.

[00:09:41] Brian: And just a real easy example of what this might look like is you work with the client, the project goes well until the very end, the revisions process, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the revisions process was horrible, dragged out, emotions got high and despite not really wanting to know the answer.

[00:09:56] Brian: You went through with this feedback flywheel and you said client, I know it was [00:10:00] tough. I would love to get your feedback on this. Again, we'll talk about what to ask. Client gives you open and honest feedback about all the reasons why the revisions process sucked and how much they hate you. You suck up your ego.

[00:10:10] Brian: You take that feedback to heart and you implement a better feedback or revisions process for the next client. The next client comes in and the process is still a little iffy, but not a train wreck. That client, you get feedback from them, they give you more reasons why your, revisions process sucked, more things that you need to improve.

[00:10:27] Brian: You suck up your ego, you fix the process, and the next client, you finally have a decent revisions process. And you just repeat this over and over again. That's the feedback flywheel in a nutshell.

[00:10:35] Brian: now the big question is. What sort of feedback do we get? What kind of questions do we ask our clients? Like, do we just say, Hey, can I get some feedback from our, project? That's what most people would probably do if they just heard this episode with no contacts or no, like specific instructions.

[00:10:46] Brian: And that's better than nothing. Honestly, like they'll give you some feedback about what's the most important feedback to give based on probably recency bias, which is going to be what happened towards the end of the project versus the stuff that happened at the beginning of the project.

[00:10:57] Brian: But there's different approaches based on your client [00:11:00] volume. There's two kind of major buckets of freelance businesses out there. There is a low volume, high dollar freelancing business. And that's where you work with a relatively low number of clients for a really high amount of money. And it's a spectrum.

[00:11:12] Brian: So there's not like a blanket answer for everybody, but then there's also the opposite of that. Where it's you work with a ton of clients for a relatively low amount of money. And again, this is the spectrum. So you live somewhere on that spectrum between low volume, high dollar and high volume, low dollar.

[00:11:26] Brian: so depending on which side of that spectrum you are as a freelancer is going to help you decide which direction makes the most sense for you. this also comes down to personal preference a little bit. And if I'm being honest with you a little bit around your commitment level as a freelancer, some people. If this is you, you're going to have a tough time. Some people want to take the easy way out. And if you want to take the easy way out, you'll take the path of least resistance.

[00:11:44] Brian: And the path of least resistance here is to either not ask for feedback or to do it the most simple, easy way possible that takes no real work on your end. That's the easy way out. The other way is the way of having a sustainable business where you do things. that are not easy to do. They are not fun [00:12:00] to do, but we know we have to do them.

[00:12:01] Brian: So that's why it comes down to a little bit of the personal preference as well. So let's talk about this. The first we're going to talk about is High volume freelance business. This is where you have tons of clients, a relatively high number of clients, in this instance we're going to send the clients a feedback form.

[00:12:12] Brian: Generally, in most of the high volume freelance businesses that I've seen, you're working at such a high capacity that you don't have a lot of individual time spent with each client. And we're talking like, I've seen freelance businesses that are doing like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or a client might be worth three to 500 bucks.

[00:12:27] Brian: If you do the math there, it's a lot of clients you're working with every year. When you're working with that many clients, you can't do some of the stuff you would do when you're working in a lower volume freelance business. So in this case, since you have a ton of numbers on your side, you get tons of clients to work with.

[00:12:39] Brian: We don't have to expect to get feedback from every single client that we work with. So when that's the case. We can have a little bit more robust of a feedback form because the few clients that do fill it out will give us more than enough feedback and we'll get a lot of qualitative and quantitative data from our clients.

[00:12:54] Brian: So I want to give you some questions to ask and we'll probably post this in our show notes. If you go to sixfigurecreative. com slash [00:13:00] two nine nine, the actual questions will be listed out and you can just. Take your pick from this if you want to use it or don't want to use it.

[00:13:06] Brian: But this is a sample like 10 question form. And it's asking 10 different questions. And they all have their specific purpose. So I'm going to start from the top here. The first is overall satisfaction. This is just an easy question. How happy are you with how things turned out? This is a one to five scale.

[00:13:18] Brian: This is our quantitative data that we can track over time. give us on average, like a 4. 8. Out of the five point scale. I think five is easier for people to really come up with ratings on a one out of ten scale. It's skewed way too much on the high end I one out of five scale is a little easier for people to do.

[00:13:33] Brian: That's just my preference But one out of five scale And you can track over time, each month we averaged this number.

[00:13:38] Brian: So that's the first question. The next question is a question around expectations. Did the end result match what you had in mind at the start? Basically, did you get what you expected? Were expectations met? Yes or no? You can word this however you want. For some of you, you would take a more professional kind of wording. I'm very like. Informal in everything I do. So that's kind of the wording I went with here. The third question is a question around [00:14:00] strengths or the good things, the positives.

[00:14:02] Brian: What did you like best about working with me? That should be open ended. The fourth question is areas for improvement. This is where we start getting into real feedback. Any thoughts on what I could do better next time?

[00:14:11] Brian: another way you can ask that is like, if you had to pick something, what's one thing you think I should work on for next time? next number five is on communication. some sort of question on communication. The one I have here is how did you find my communication style? Is it too much, too little, or just right? That one can be a radio dial, okay? Like they select one of the three options there. It depends on if you're doing quantitative or qualitative.

[00:14:30] Brian: When you're in a high volume freelance business, you're going to probably err on the side of quantitative. But sometimes you want qualitative data. If you don't know what that means, quantitative means you're looking at the quantity of things. So on average, which one of these three did they pick? if you want qualitative data, that means you're focused on the quality of the data.

[00:14:45] Brian: You're going to get less of it Fewer people overall are going to fill out these like, open ended forms where it's just like a block of text supposed to fill in. But you're going to get much more valuable data from that. So you got to pick your battles here. But that one could be one where you might want to have an open text field for them to put whatever they want.

[00:14:58] Brian: Because some people might have a lot of [00:15:00] feedback there. They thought that was your weak point. They want to give you a lot of things there. And some people it's just like, it was good. No problems. Number six question is timeliness. Did the timing of everything work out for you?

[00:15:09] Brian: Did you have any issues with deadlines?

[00:15:10] Brian: Usually you'll know what their answer will be for this ahead of time. But again, when you're thinking high volume business, You don't know everything for every client. Some clients might have thought it was going to be by this date and it wasn't. And you start seeing this as a repeat thing from all your clients.

[00:15:22] Brian: Then timeliness is an issue you need to address. Number seven is problem solving. When problems came up or things got tricky, how do you think I handled it? In a high volume freelance business, there's probably not going to be a whole lot of problem solving. You probably cut this one out if that were the case for you.

[00:15:34] Brian: But when you're working like. Super bespoke projects that are very customized, that are very high touch when we get into the kind of the next business model for freelancers, which is the low volume, high dollar. This is a much more important cause you're going to, you're going to come up against so many roadblocks, so many problems.

[00:15:49] Brian: You've got to be a great problem solver as a freelancer in general, but your clients typically don't see you overcoming those problems in a high volume freelance business. But again, That's a blanket, statement in a very non blanket industry, that's [00:16:00] number seven. Number eight is a question around professionalism.

[00:16:02] Brian: How is it working with me on a professional level? Again, that one makes sense to just have an open ended text field there. number nine is referral likelihood. Again, you're not going to label these by the way.

[00:16:10] Brian: I'm just giving you like what the gist of this question is before I say it. You would just have this listed in a bunch of questions in a form with a client. Would you recommend me to your friends or colleagues? I would probably reword this a little bit depending on the niche, like in my background in music production.

[00:16:25] Brian: Would you recommend me to other bands? Or would you recommend me to your friends or other bands? Something that's niche specific and then number 10 a question around whether you want to work together in the future And that is would you consider working together on future projects?

[00:16:36] Brian: Why or why not?

[00:16:37] Brian: You can get complicated with this. There's things called Logic forms where you can say like would you ever consider working together for future projects? Yes, or no if they say no, it'll ask open ended question. Why not you say yes, it'll pop down a little open ended question Why did you choose?

[00:16:51] Brian: Yes, that way you're getting like actual good feedback like, hey, it was a pleasure working with you. I love working together. I would never go to someone else now. So that is the high volume approach feedback [00:17:00] form and that can work really well if you have a lot of clients coming to you now for a loaf volume freelance businesses.

[00:17:05] Brian: You have a couple options. The first option, the one that I prefer is you have some sort of call set up and you're doing this in real time from clients. you're not going to ask all these questions, you're not going to word it in that sort of way, but you're going to have a feedback call.

[00:17:16] Brian: Now there's different times you can do it. You can either do it post project, again, when all things are done, money's exchanged, files are delivered, project's over, try to set up a call. You can call it a feedback call, or you can just set up a call with them to chat. Or you can do it when you deliver the final files. Every niche is different, again your mileage may vary, but a good time to get feedback from your clients is when you're delivering the final files and you can do that over a call.

[00:17:37] Brian: You can call it a file handoff call, whatever you want, but it's where you're just saying, Hey, cool. Project's done. Let's jump on a call. I'll send over all the files. Make sure you have everything that you need. I have a few questions for you in a call setting. That is the most qualitative setting. You can have because you're not just getting one way answers.

[00:17:51] Brian: You can have real conversations about things and you can dig in and get deeper and deeper into the actual root causes of the reasons or why they felt that way. You don't get that with a [00:18:00] form. Unless you have a call with someone after they fill a form, which is also a possibility. The other option is a more simplified form.

[00:18:05] Brian: The other form is a lot to ask. And the only reason I would ever ask that many questions is if you have a high volume of clients coming through. Because only a small percentage of people is going to actually fill it out.

[00:18:14] Brian: So when you have fewer clients, you can't afford to dump a bunch of questions on them, 10 questions. So I've simplified this kind of what I consider the more important bits it's only four questions. So the first one is, again, a question around overall satisfaction. I still like the one to five scale. If you're sending a form to somebody, how happy are you with how things turned out? One out of five scale. That's the first question. Second question is a question around like the best, part of working together. So what was the best part of working with me? Third question, improvements. What's one thing I could do better.

[00:18:43] Brian: The fourth question is future collaboration question. Would you consider working together for future projects? Why or why not?

[00:18:48] Brian: That's the more simplified form whenever it's, you just don't want to dump a bunch of questions on that. three clients or four clients a month that you work with, or for some of you with bigger projects, the one client a month you work with.

[00:18:57] Brian: And you can do this a number of ways. You can do a form, like a simple form, [00:19:00] like you would do for a high volume business and just send that to your clients. But I think in a lot of cases, it actually makes more sense to just send a simple email. When you do it this way, I think you get a higher compliance, meaning that people actually follow through and use it.

[00:19:10] Brian: We're used to getting feedback forms all the time from big businesses. It just feels very impersonal. But when you get an email from somebody that says, Hey, so glad to have wrapped it. I'm not so glad to wrap up the project. It was an awful project. So glad to wrap this thing up. So glad to have set the files off.

[00:19:25] Brian: So I everything's going well with the band or with the project or with the business. One thing that I'm really working on is improving. Everything that we do at, your company name or your business name, would it be too much to ask to get these questions answered? I'll paste them below This could be a template you send out at the end of a project, but because it's just written out questions in an email, it feels way more personal. There's no unsubscribe link in the email,

[00:19:47] Brian: But now we're getting feedback from our clients. Holy that's awesome. Something you've probably ignored to this point.

[00:19:53] Brian: if you remember the whole point of this is to have the feedback flywheel. just like when you're on a bicycle, you're on that gear that's really hard to turn pedals. [00:20:00] Freelancing is the same way. It's really hard to start up, but over time it should get easier.

[00:20:04] Brian: And this is one of the ways of making easier for us is getting feedback from our clients. So that means when we get feedback from our clients, we need to actually use it to address not just the problems or the symptoms, but the root causes.

[00:20:14] Brian: An example would be if a client gives you, problems around communication speed, you didn't respond back to them fast enough. one approach to that would be, I just do emails once a day. So instead of doing emails once a day, I'm going to do it twice a day. I'll do mornings and evenings instead of just evenings.

[00:20:28] Brian: Cause if you read four hour work week with Tim Ferriss, he says, batch your email times, old book, still relevant to this day in a lot of ways. Maybe not in some others,

[00:20:35] Brian: that'd be a logical solution. It may be the right solution, but it may not be the root cause. The root cause could actually go all the way back to communicating and over communicating at the start of a project, what those communication guidelines are. Again, go back and re listen to the series if you need to.

[00:20:49] Brian: But just talking through what the client should expect can set their expectations so that that one time per day response that they get is right in line with what they expected. And if that's what they expected, and [00:21:00] that's what they got, then they're probably not going to be complaining about it from this point on.

[00:21:03] Brian: So you don't need to respond to emails twice a day. You can keep doing it once per day. And the client is still satisfied. It's not that anything changed, it's that the root cause of the problem that came up is actually what changed. The root cause being that you didn't communicate what your communication guidelines are.

[00:21:17] Brian: Another example could be that the project dragged on past the deadline at the end of the project.

[00:21:22] Brian: And when you start investigating, it could be that the revisions portion of it dragged on. Again, go back the revisions episode of this series that's an issue that you constantly deal with. But it could be that they dragged on because the clients were not responding with feedback.

[00:21:34] Brian: Fast enough meaning you were sending the files to the client and the client was sitting on them for days Before they actually got the feedback to you or weeks in some cases before they got the feedback to you And because the client didn't respond quickly the project dragged on they've started getting antsy Expecting you to do things immediately as soon as they got the feedback, but you couldn't because it overlapped with the next project because the client didn't actually do their part, which means the root cause of that is not just [00:22:00] setting a deadline for clients feedback, they have to get it done by this deadline.

[00:22:03] Brian: And not just having a consequence for them not doing that, aka, if you don't get it back by this date, the project will be pushed back. But also communicating those deadlines, communicating those expectations and those consequences of not getting the things done. Communication is probably the root cause of most of the problems that you're experiencing as a freelancer.

[00:22:21] Brian: But another reason that the revisions dragged down is because maybe it was 10 rounds of revisions. Maybe they just kept coming back with more and more and more problems. And if you investigate and find the root cause of what's causing all these rounds of revisions,

[00:22:31] Brian: It could be as simple as just saying, Hey, we're doing three rounds and that's it before I start charging it. It could be that the client is actually really scared to put it out in the world. That's something I ran into very common music production where the client is creative just like me. And they have their own fears and flaws and issues.

[00:22:47] Brian: And the rounds and rounds and rounds of revisions are actually just a reflection of their insecurities and perfectionist issues. And there actually needs to be. Maybe a little bit of communication, a little bit of education of the client, and maybe even a little empathy on your [00:23:00] part, but maybe just some tough love.

[00:23:01] Brian: But whatever the issue, you see how you're not just, addressing the symptom, not just addressing the surface level thing, but we're trying to dig in deeper to figure out what is the one thing that if we were to just do that, it prevents this problem from ever happening in the first place.

[00:23:14] Brian: Now here's a fun bonus for you though. If you're actually gathering client feedback and you're actually good at what you do, most of the feedback you get from clients will actually be positive things. That should be saying good stuff back to you, which is a great sign. And here's the good part about that.

[00:23:27] Brian: If you're doing this, if you're asking for feedback from your clients constantly, you can turn all the good feedback into testimonials and reviews.

[00:23:33] Brian: And I'll give you an example. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but it's worth just reiterating here because it's a very similar thing. It's the testimonial slash review flywheel. You get a client, you do good work,

[00:23:42] Brian: and when you do good work with the client, you get good feedback from the clients. And when you get good feedback from the clients, you can turn that good feedback into more reviews or testimonials on your website and on Google, probably the only good review that matters.

[00:23:54] Brian: And when you get more reviews and testimonials from clients, that's more social proof. That means that, oh man, he's got 100 reviews on [00:24:00] Google and they're all five stars. these testimonials on the website. I know all these people. I'm more likely to hire you now. And when you have the social proof, it's easier to get more clients.

[00:24:07] Brian: And because you do good work, it's easier to get more feedback. And the loop just gets easier and easier. Every time you get more reviews, more testimonials, and it goes on and on and on. And this is something that we utilized from the very start of this podcast. We put out five episodes and all we asked for was feedback from people.

[00:24:21] Brian: And we got some really good. critical feedback that help us improve things early on. We got some really nice positive feedback in every single one of those. We got 70 something five star reviews like the first week of the show because every single one of those we did exactly what I would tell every freelancer to do.

[00:24:36] Brian: We need good, good feedback from a client. Say, hey, thank you so much for that feedback. Would you mind if we use that as a testimonial? If you need it as a testimonial or better yet in high volume freelance businesses, this is more important or businesses where you're ranking on like Google locations.

[00:24:49] Brian: Like if you have a physical location or, some sort of location where you can actually review on the Google listing, you say, hey, thank you so much for the positive review. glad you had a great experience. Would you mind putting this part of that [00:25:00] feedback? into a Google review. Here's one click where you can add the feedback and you give them a one click link.

[00:25:04] Brian: And all they got to do is copy and paste that in there. They give five stars and you will get review after review after review. That is the secret to getting tons and tons of reviews, which turns into social proof, which turns into more clients. That's not the point of all this. The point is to make a better experience for your clients and utilize the feedback to fix root cause problems.

[00:25:22] Brian: But this is just a nice little bonus that we get out of it. If you're good at what you do, you can get some reviews. It rhymed, I didn't mean it to rhyme. I'm sorry. So that is everything that I can possibly bring up for now about Infinite Clients, but here's what I need from you right this second.

[00:25:34] Brian: I need your feedback. You've gone through this whole eight part series. All I want you to do is give me open and honest feedback on what we can do to improve. There's a few questions for you. We get a form because it's high volume podcasts. We were the number two design podcast, even though we're not a design podcast, we were ranked number two podcast the design category because I think I put entrepreneurial and design as like our two categories on there.

[00:25:54] Brian: So high volume podcasts. So I'm sending people to a form. So just go to six figure creative. com [00:26:00] slash better B E T T E R. All I'm trying to do is make this podcast better. So go fill that out. You don't have to fill out all the questions. Just pick and choose what you want to fill out. If you want a response, you can put your content info in.

[00:26:10] Brian: If you don't want a response, you just want to be 100 percent anonymous. And just tell me all the things you hate about this show. Go for it. I practice what I preach. We get feedback from people. We try to implement as much of that as we can. And truth be told, I could be better about getting feedback more often from people.

[00:26:23] Brian: So this is my cry to you saying, Hey, do it with your clients, obviously, but you're listening to the show. Please give me feedback. that is it for this episode again, go to sixfigurecreative. com slash better B E T T E R. Give me feedback.

[00:26:35] Brian: And that is it for the series. This is the last episode in the two hundreds. Next week we start a new era, a new chapter, a new hundreds episode of the Six Figure Creative Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.