You’re Booked Solid. Now What? | The Real Reason You’re Stuck at $100K

355. Hiring people to work out for you

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Brian: [00:00:00] This episode is for my six figure plus freelancers out there. If you're making a hundred KA year or more or you're just, making less than that, but you're curious about this episode, this is for you. Over the last few months, we have been working with larger and larger freelancers and even agencies.

Brian: Our, largest client is like a $5 million a year agency. And our smallest client is somebody who just left their job at an agency and is now trying to go freelance. So they're basically at the beginning of their journey. So we, I've seen the entire journey. I've seen both sides. I've seen the middle. And this episode is more for that messy middle, the people that are at a hundred KA year, trying to move up to eventually an agency level, even if it's like a micro agency.

Brian: and at this point I've seen so many six figure freelancers stuck. Because they've hit their limit. It's usually between, it can be on the low end, 75,000 a year, usually around a hundred, 150,000 a year. You hit this like limit of how much work you can take on. Sometimes it can be as high as 250 up to three or 400,000 a year.

Brian: I've rarely seen a solar freelancer go beyond that. Oh, there are examples of that, but you can't take on more projects because you're booked solid and you end up dropping the ball on the clients that you're working with because you've got so much stuff on your plate.

Brian: So what happens is you either smartly start raising your rates in [00:01:00] an effort to start essentially working with less clients because the best way, in my opinion, to reject a client and let them know you can't work with 'em, is to just raise your rates. So they have to, move on to someone else.

Brian: But that's a smart way of doing it generally, if you're booked solid that much. The other way that people tend to respond to this when they're overwhelmed with too much work is they understandably keep taking on more and more work because they don't wanna say no to money.

Brian: And so they never really get outta this hole to get themselves into. And sometimes they just dig deeper and deeper and deeper where you're dropping the ball, you got too much work going on things are successful because you're making more money, but.

Brian: At a certain point, you've just plateaued. You cannot get past this upper limit that your business model has.

Brian: So the question is, how can we break through this? Especially if your goal is to eventually become an agency owner you're making that leap from solar freelancer to maybe a micro agency with just a few, three or four people, or maybe even a full blown agency with a full team and everything.

Brian: that is the whole point for this episode today. This is basically how you get past that six figure, low, six figure kind of plateau eventually grow into high six figures or even seven figures. that's, through the agency model

Brian: that. I first wanna, before I go into like the details of like how to do this or what, sort of things to think through [00:02:00] with this. I wanna talk about working out, and the reason I brought this up is because I forget where I heard this, but I heard someone talking about this. This kinda analogy.

Brian: And most freelancers, they treat their business like fitness. Like If you're working out or you're trying to get stronger, you're trying to get faster, you're trying to get more flexible, or you wanna run further, maybe you wanna do ultra marathons. Whatever it is your fitness goal is, you're the one that has to put in the work in order to get there.

Brian: You can hire a personal trainer, you can hire someone to help out, but they can only get you so far. You're obviously the person doing all of the work.

Brian: They obviously can't work out for you. They can only help you. Be more efficient, work on the right things, et cetera, et cetera. But what if they could, what if they could work out for you? Think through that. What if you could hire a personal trainer? You could hire a running trainer to train for that marathon for you.

Brian: What if you could hire some sort of power lifting specialist to make you stronger they do all the work and you get all the results. They go to the gym for you. They work out for you. They diet for you.

Brian: They deal with all the muscle soreness. They deal with all the fatigue. They're the ones who have to wake up early to go to the gym before work.

Brian: But you get all of the results. I personally would a hundred percent do this. I like working out, don't get me wrong there's like a certain element to it [00:03:00] that's just a nice way to start my day. there might still be some version of that. For me, it'd probably be just like a morning walk.

Brian: If I could literally hire someone to do all the hard stuff to give me the results that I want, I would a hundred percent do it. and I think it would fundamentally change how the fitness industry worked as a whole, if that were an option that people could do.

Brian: Now, while that's a ridiculous premise, someone else working out for you and you getting the results, this is literally how it works in business. You hire an employee, they work for you. They do all of the work and you as the business owner, you get all of the results for it. That is literally how an agency works and that's what I wanna dive into today.

Brian: So if you're new here, I'm Brian Hood. This is Six Figure Creative podcast. The whole point of this podcast is to take influence from a lot of different, businesses that I see.

Brian: 'cause we have over 200 freelance and agency businesses that we coach at this point and help them with client acquisition and marketing and systems and processes and CRM set up and. Dealing with clients and all that stuff. So I get a really good top town view of a lot of different businesses at this point and a lot of different niches.

Brian: And I take all those learnings and bring 'em the podcast. And also I take a lot of influence from outside of industries like the SaaS industry. I've talked about this on past episodes where I looked at the software as a service industry. A lot of other industries [00:04:00] have really cool things we can bring back for freelancers to implement.

Brian: And that's the goal here, is to not become a homogenous business where you are simply looking to your left and to your right in your tiny little circle to say, I'm gonna be the other photographer that's gonna have this stupid gallery website with no copy on it and no information about me or why you should pick me over everyone else.

Brian: That's what I don't wanna hear today is you to be yet another freelancer who looks like everyone else. That sounds like something you're interested in. You're in the right place. You

Brian: So back to the topic at hand. We're talking about hiring someone. To essentially work out for you so that you get all the results. And there's a book that I really enjoyed from Dan Martel. It's called The Buyback Principle Good book. He has something in the book called,

Brian: I always wanna call it the Buyback Ladder. I. His book actually calls it the Replacement Ladder, which I think is actually pretty good name. And on this ladder, it's essentially a vertical ladder with the lowest rung all the way to the top rung. There are five rungs on the ladder, and the goal is to get the first rung taken care of, hire someone out, delegate all this stuff on that first rung so that it frees you up, gives you more time for the second rung.

Brian: higher up, all the things on the second rung that frees you up to do the third rung, fourth and ultimately the [00:05:00] fifth rung and the ladder ultimately buying back all your time. Yay. And I wanna talk through this principle a little bit on this episode here, because the first two are specifically important for you as a freelancer if you want to get out of freelance and into more of an agency life.

Brian: Just because you're an agency doesn't mean you have to just run a business and you're not doing any of the creative work at all. But some people. They do gravitate more naturally to being a business owner. And so they want an agency, they want to build something bigger, something with a full team, something that they control, the deal flow and they can have a team of amazing smart people around them to do work better than maybe you could yourself.

Brian: And a lot of those people, the founders of agencies, still do some of the creative work. They cherry pick the best projects that they wanna work on. So they still get that creative itch scratched, but they're not doing. Basic admin stuff. So let me actually talk through the steps of the buyback ladder and then I'll tell you where I kind of argue with his methodology when it comes to freelancers and then where the, basically the gap is for.

Brian: Making that leap from solo freelancer into an agency. ' 'cause there's a, there's a line that you definitely cross where you're no longer in solo freelancer, and you're definitely an agency. And if that's the goal that you have for yourself, then [00:06:00] that's an important part to get to. So the first rung on the ladder is admin.

Brian: The second rung on the ladder is delivery. I'll go into details with this in a second. The third rung on the ladder is marketing. This is where I start to disagree. The fourth rung on the ladder is sales. And the fifth rung on the ladder is leadership. So let's go all the way back to the bottom of the ladder.

Brian: It's the admin wrong on the buyback ladder

Brian: when we're talking about hiring somebody to do the work for you, for you to get the results. Another way of framing it is, how can I free up some of my time so that I can work on higher and better things in my business that get me paid more? Because in your business, there's a whole list of things that you have to do from day to day to day, from week to week to month to month to year to year, stuff you have to do every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year.

Brian: And all those individual tasks can range from. $5 an hour tasks, up to 500 an hour tasks, maybe even a thousand or $5,000 an hour tasks. Things that you don't do very often, but are very high lever that make a big impact to your business Overall, more strategic, big picture things all the way to the $5 an hour tasks, things that anybody with a pulse could do.

Brian: And in some countries, five bucks an hour is a good, [00:07:00] reasonable, livable, wage that can impact a family. But I'm also not telling you to go out there and pay someone five bucks an hour for this stuff. Anyone that I've hired, I'm paying full US wages on my team. I'm not doing geo arbitrage or anything.

Brian: Even one of our teammates who's in Eastern Europe, I pay a full US salary because I believe in paying someone based on the value they bring my business.

Brian: But let's talk about the replacement ladder rung number one. That's admin work. This is the biggest thing that freelancers need to get off their plates as soon as humanly possible. If you're looking to hire somebody to bring into your world.

Brian: This is the place to start. It's easiest thing to do, getting an administrative assistant or a friend or a family member or somebody who's curious about what you do. Just dip your toe in this area. So the first things that I, tell people to, get rid of is any sort of email or CRM management stuff where you're sending a receiving files to clients.

Brian: You're sending templated emails for things like follow ups or scheduling meetings or getting back to clients about basic requests or scheduling information or anything. Anything that you have a template for. It doesn't require much brain power or thought. That's the first off on the email inbox or CRM that I want to delegate to an admin assistant.

Brian: ' [00:08:00] cause those things can be time consuming. They can get you in the middle of your creative tasks, you wanna pick up your phone. You see an email like, oh, that's really easy. I'll respond back really quick. And then it takes you out of your flow state. It does more damage than you really think it does.

Brian: And here's the thing, if you're using a good CRM. The first time I ever did this was I had read Virtual Freedom by Chris Ducker

Brian: and I hired an assistant, this guy named Sean. He worked with me for. Two years or so, and he handled all my CRM inbox I was using close.io at the time. But close.com now, it's a CRM, still around, pretty solid CRM, not the one we use anymore, not the one we recommend, but it works well enough.

Brian: And he was in my CRM handling. Basically all my emails, and at any point, if he didn't know what to do or how to do it, he would just assign the conversation back to me. Any good. CRM has a way to assign conversations or to ping or tag people to bring them into something that they don't know how to handle or they need to bring another person on.

Brian: any good CRM has that feature and so he would just shoot stuff my way that he didn't know how to handle. I would jump in there beginning at the of my day, and I would respond to those emails he didn't know how to handle or was above his pay grade essentially.

Brian: That's one of the first things to get off your [00:09:00] plate. It doesn't take as much brainpower as you probably think it does to handle all that stuff, and if it does take that much brainpower, it's either because entire offer, what you're doing for people is so scattered and not productized that every single thing looks different.

Brian: That's a whole other set of challenges that makes everything I'm talking about this episode more difficult.

Brian: It makes it more difficult for you. It makes it more difficult for someone else you're bringing on to do.

Brian: But then above and beyond this, there's other admin tasks that eat away at your time and honestly, more mental bandwidth than anything else. There are, invoicing and payments, and contracts, all those sorts of things. Anything that can be automated, although most of that can be automated at this point.

Brian: should be handled by some sort of admin assistant. Scheduling social media posts. If you post on social media, opening up your app and posting the thing that you've created for the week or for the month, or whatever content you've, prepared this week.

Brian: That sort of stuff can be done by an admin assistant. There are plenty of apps out there that make that scheduling stuff easy and assistant can handle that stuff. And the same for sending marketing emails. If you have an email list, you're sending emails to your email list, which is a smart thing to do.

Brian: If you have an email list and assistant can do all of that, you can write it up in a notion document. You can send 'em the notion document and they [00:10:00] can handle literally everything else. These are all things that just require a simple set of steps, maybe one two minute loom video, some bullet points of what you do, and then they can ask you any follow up questions about steps they have, questions about that you can fill in more details on.

Brian: That is how I've personally gotten so many things off of my plate, and I'll talk about later on where I'm at in this buyback ladder or replacement ladder. But this is the first area. It's just admin stuff. Anything that is non-creative tasks doesn't necessarily have to be project related.

Brian: We'll talk about that next, but it's just anything that is administrative work, someone else can do that and should do that, and you get that off your plate first before you worry about these other things. That's the first rung in the ladder. Once you've done that and you train someone up and they're running along and they're doing things well, and they're saving you time, now you have a little extra breathing room.

Brian: The first thing we don't do is take on more work immediately. We have more time. Let's take on more work. No, because the goal here is long term. We're not looking for next week or next month. We're looking for next year, next decade. How can we make our lives better over the next few years, We have to use this extra time to invest it into your business for the second rung on the buyback ladder or the replacement ladder, and that is delivery. This is [00:11:00] anything that does not require your specific expertise first. That's the first thing I wanna get off your plate, or when we're going into agency mode, where you're actually getting things completely off your plate. You can likely find people who are better than you at doing the thing that you do yourself.

Brian: And I've witnessed this myself, and I'll talk about that in a bit. But there's three, tiers of creative work here. We're talking about delivery. Again, delivery is just, you're paid to do something. I'm going to deliver a, final project to a client. This is what I'm talking about here.

Brian: Anything between those two steps, I've been paid. Now I deliver something to the client. That's most of your work right there is delivery. That's where most of your day is spent. That is where we generally. Get most of the creative fulfillment that we have day to day in our, creative pursuits, right?

Brian: This is what we literally want to do all day. If you could do this all day, you would. However, even people that I know that love their craft so much, they love their craft, they're obsessed with it. If they could do it all day, they would do it. There's still things within that that they don't love doing that are tedious and boring.

Brian: So that's tier one. The first tier one things to get off your list. I call these just a non-creative tasks. These are like basic setup work, basic creative work. Maybe for web designer it's like setting [00:12:00] up the WordPress backend or the Shopify backend or the Webflow backend or the GHL backend or whatever it is that you use app-wise.

Brian: If you're an audio, like my background, if it's a session setup in pro tools or whatever dog you use, naming files, getting back to clients, about files that were corrupt or that weren't labeled correctly or whatever. All that tedious back and forth stuff can be handled by anyone with basic knowledge of the craft that you do.

Brian: Any sort of beginner, intermediate person who's curious and wants to get deeper into the field, you can take them under your wing for this sort of work. There's editing work, whether you're editing audio, video photo, doing design tweaks. All the editing work can generally be handed off to somebody pretty early on.

Brian: Formatting things, layout adjustments any sort of like easy tedious client revisions. You know, When the client sends you 35,000 things to change, all in a bullet point list of all like tiny pixel changes or if you're in audio 0.5 decibel changes where honestly I don't do half the time and the client still is happy if my audio guys, if you know, you know, these are the things you can pass to assistant to just do for you.

Brian: That's tier one. That's the first thing we get off our list. Tier two is more [00:13:00] creative tasks. These are things that are, their talent is actually required. It's likely you're gonna be higher pay than the tier one work. It's gonna be, more high level creative decisions made by the person, so you gotta trust them a bit more, but you're still quality controlling or QCing everything.

Brian: Your eyes are still on everything before it's delivered to the client. you should eventually over time build trust with this person and maybe eventually just be completely hands off. But especially when they start out, or especially if they're not particularly great at their job, you have to quality control and adjust.

Brian: You're basically letting them take it the first 75 to 80 to 90% and you're taking it the last 10%. This is really effective. This is a good way of doing a lot of different things. And this is the level that I got to, when I was doing mixing work full time. And that is where I would have, One assistant do all the tier one, one assistant, do all the tier two, and then I was like the finisher for everything. And it would mean that for something that would take 10 hours, I might have an hour in of my own time.

Brian: So that's tier two. Then we get to tier three, and this is like to me, the holy grail of delivery. If you want to have an agency, you have to have this and that is full delegation. That is where, if you send something your employee with tier three level, fulfillment, they can send you [00:14:00] something back that you're a hundred percent happy with.

Brian: Maybe a tweak or two, but generally speaking, they can take it the entire way there with minimal or no oversight. If you want to do this, it is going to require a good training process, a good employee onboarding process, especially if you wanna scale with multiple team members. So if you ever plan to have.

Brian: A larger team, you need to have a really good onboarding and training process. Even without that, you still wanna think through how you're going to onboard and train new people, because if you don't have this, you are tied very much to a specific individual that can leave at any time. So that puts a big risk on your business.

Brian: Whereas if you have a good system and process for bringing on new people, training 'em up quickly and getting 'em started soon, now you're not so tied to one individual, you're tied to a process where you ultimately just wanna button a seat. I talk about on this podcast all the time, how you don't wanna be the button seat freelancer, but you do wanna get your business to the point where you can have it run by button seat freelancers because he or she who controls the flow of projects, controls everything.

Brian: You have all the power. This is how agencies exist. That's why they can have employees.

Brian: But the mistake that I see time and time again, actually this is [00:15:00] something we saw from a recent client that we just onboarded this last week or this week, He had like 25% margins with tier two and tier three freelancers on his team. Meaning if he gets paid 10 grand for something, he might actually net.

Brian: Less than 2,500, and he was doing like two or $3,000 project. So on a $3,000 project, he might come away with seven 50 bucks, maybe less.

Brian: This does not work for a real business. If you want a recipe for a really high stress, low profit agency, be my guest, do that. But if you want full delegation where you have tier three freelancers working for you, they're the butts in the seat. They're the ones doing most of all the work, and you're just cherry picking the projects you want to do.

Brian: And you want profitability to be able to have breathing room so that you're paying your bills. You have money in the bank for your business. So if something comes up or something changes or you have a bad month or someone leaves the team and you get hire quickly or anything that comes up.

Brian: You have buffer. Buffer or margin. It's all we want as creatives to stay sane, stay creative, not let our business destroy us. For that, we need profit margin, and so what I have heard from everyone that I trust in business, [00:16:00] 80% gross margins is the number to shoot for 80% or greater. Meaning if you get paid $10,000 on a project, you should be able to fulfill on everything involving. That project for $2,000 or less, 20% or less, means you net 80% in gross profit before obviously all your business expenses, any marketing expenses you have, any other admin team members. But when you're paying a button seat freelancer to do something, you have to have your pricing and your model set up in a way that they can deliver on 20% of whatever you get paid.

Brian: And if that sounds like you're underpaying people. I'm telling you, if you have a steady flow of clients coming in the door, you're the one taking all the risk. As the business owner, you're the one paying for all the leads. If you're doing paid marketing or you're the one creating all the content.

Brian: If you're doing content marketing or you're the one doing all the in-person connections, you're the one with a network that's bringing in your clients. That is a valuable thing and if you have that, you have all the power. And if you have all the power, you're not using it to nefariously do things.

Brian: You've got to first and foremost have a stable, dependable business that your employees can depend on their paychecks to come every week or every month, [00:17:00] and they're not gonna be worried about you, going under at any given moment. One of my employees actually worked for an agency before. He's one of our coaches at company.

Brian: He worked at a marketing agency where the agency out of nowhere folded and laid off their entire staff, and they had no idea the business was not doing well. That's the example of what happens when you don't have good margins, you don't have fundamental things in place to keep that stuff from happening.

Brian: But there's a reason that creatives will work at agencies for years and years and years is because they want stability. Many people, they just crave stability, and a job offers that. So agencies need profit. Employees need stability, and if you can offer both, you're in a good place.

Brian: and you can make things work well, you can pay people well, and you're gonna track really good talent. At my company, our newest coach is amazing. by the time this here, he'll already be taking on new clients.

Brian: But this is our second new coach that started this month. He built his agency to $2.6 million a year. He sold it in 2022 and then he was head of marketing for two more companies. He helped them double from three to 6 million. And now he's one of our coaches. And the reason he wants to work for me is because he does not want to run a business.

Brian: It's not something that he's [00:18:00] interested in. He's already done that. He made his money, but he also had his stress involved with that. And so I offer stability here, and I offer an interesting opportunity where if you've ever looked for jobs, and especially in the marketing space, people that have marketing backgrounds is who I look for when I'm hiring.

Brian: there's not any jobs really for being a coach for people. So a very interesting opportunity that my, you can call me an agency's kind of an agency model. Offers people, but I can pay well enough to attract quality people and I have good enough profit margins in my business.

Brian: 'cause I practice what I preach so that I have profit and they have stability. And those two things go hand in hand for an agency.

Brian: So that's just the second rung on the buyback ladder. The one I wanted to focus on most for this episode because it's the place that everyone gets stuck at as freelancers because we are creatives, so we want to create things, and so we get stuck when it comes to how do we delegate things in the creative field when this is the stuff we started wanting to do in the first place.

Brian: So again, that's tier one. Non-creative tasks. Get that off your plate first after admin, by the way, then tier two creative tasks where it's things that are actually creative work does require some talent, but you're overseeing everything and they look at 'em as like a, a number two in the [00:19:00] company, right?

Brian: And eventually you want to either work that person up too or hire somebody who's at the talent level where you can actually trust them to do the job as good or better than you. The

Brian: the coach I just mentioned, I a hundred percent trust him ' cause he's built his business to seven figures, himself. He scaled other companies to six, $7 million a year. Plus he spent over $15 million on paid ads where I've barely spent a million on paid ads. So do you think that I trust him when it comes to anything he does to coach clients in my company?

Brian: A hundred percent. I trust him. And that's the level you need to get to in your company if you want to effectively scale an agency.

Brian: once we get to that level, this is where I start disagreeing with the buyback ladder or the Replacement Ladder as Dan Martel assess it, especially for Creative businesses. Creative agencies. the next three rungs are marketing, sales, then leadership.

Brian: I'm proof in an example, and I've seen this, that you can get past the multimillion dollar year range and still handle marketing yourself. I still handle all the marketing in my company.

Brian: It is not a full-time job, even at the level that we're at right now. Eventually, I will have to get this off my hands. So I basically skipped this rung and went straight to sales. Sales is the fourth rung in the [00:20:00] ladder. This is above marketing, and in Dan Martel's words, you get marketing off your plate first, but you hold on to sales.

Brian: that can be fine in certain businesses, but in my business it didn't make sense. I wanted to get sales off my plate because we were getting so many book calls in our company that I couldn't run the company and do sales. So sales was definitely a full-time role before marketing was in my company.

Brian: And it's likely the same in your agency as well if you're getting more than one or two scheduled calls per day. And you will, once you get past the seven figure range or the high six figure range as a freelancer or micro agency or even scaling agency, once you get past that point, you'll at least schedule more than one or two calls and depends on what your show rate is, 60 to 75%.

Brian: You'll have, one to two calls per day, up to six or seven calls a week. That's the point where you, want to get this off your plate because if you have two or even three calls on your calendar every day, that throws a big wrench in your schedule for the day because you don't know if those people are gonna show or not. You don't how the conversation's gonna go.

Brian: You know how long it might go. And so if you're have three big blocks in your calendar every day taken out, or even two, it throws off everything. So that's why I would like to get that off my plate before. Anything else in [00:21:00] this buyback principle ladder. And I think it's the same for you. You don't wanna be on the phone having client conversations all day long.

Brian: And by the time you get to the point where it makes sense to do this, there is probably someone on your team or you can find someone with the background and expertise for sales to do this for you. Sales is it's own profession. There are people who are dedicated their entire lives to learning this craft.

Brian: I can guarantee they're better at it than you.

Brian: Joe is my number one guy in my company for sales. I hired him early 2023. He's done well over a thousand completed calls at this point, whereas in my own company, I've done less than 200, maybe a hundred, 150 calls myself completed. So he has more experience than me. He's been doing it longer than me.

Brian: He's better at it than me.

Brian: And frankly, I don't wanna spend all day on the phone. It doesn't gimme energy. It's not what I want to do, right? But he loves doing it and therefore I hired him to do it. So depending on how your business is run, how you do things, you could try to delegate marketing before sales, but I, recommend the opposite.

Brian: Delegate sales and then eventually delegate marketing. And we're still at the point where I need to delegate marketing, but. The fifth rung on the ladder is ultimately [00:22:00] leadership. This is where I'm starting to kind of get into this year, going into next year. This is where we're creating departments within a company, which is where you actually have a bigger company.

Brian: Right now we're at

Brian: eight people not counting contractors. And then we have a ninth starting with us probably next month. As we grow, I can't be the head of every department. There is the sales department, there is the marketing department, there is the product department, there is the coaching department, there is the operations department.

Brian: And in an agency you're gonna have similar types of departments. You're going to have sales department, you're gonna have marketing department, you're gonna have fulfillment or delivery department. So for me, that's coaching and a product. Those are two kind of separate departments, in our company. And you're gonna have operations.

Brian: And as you grow, you're going to have heads of each department, the head of marketing, the head of sales, the head of product, the head of coaching, or the head coach, the head of operations. Those are the people that are going to be responsible for every department. And at a certain point, like I am still the bottleneck in my own company in many ways.

Brian: People are waiting on certain things for me, or I'm the only one with that specialized knowledge to answer certain question. And so I, get pulled in a lot of different directions all day long because I have a [00:23:00] growing team and we have, fires to put out and new things to do, and new things we're trying to work on and new initiatives we're trying to build.

Brian: And in order for us to get to the, 3, 5, 8, $10 million a year range, I cannot be the head of every department, which I am right now. So leadership and putting leaders into place is kind of the final rung and the ladder that gets you ultimately where I would like to be, which is just the strategic overview of the company making the big decisions, a true CEO at that point.

Brian: And I will refuse to put CEO on my title anywhere, especially LinkedIn, until I make that jump if ever, honestly. that's the buyback or the replacement ladder. With freelancers trying to make that shift from low six figures to mid to high six figures, up to seven figures. And you want to make that agency model shift on that buyback ladder or replacement ladder rungs one, admin and rungs two delivery.

Brian: Or fulfillment. Those are the two things to get off your plate. The first and biggest things to focus on. again, you can have an agency where you're high six figures, low, seven figures where you're still doing all the marketing, you're do still doing all the sales. You're still the head of every department.

Brian: You can still do that and it's perfectly viable. if you want to grow beyond that, you wanna get to that 5 million a year range. Like one of our [00:24:00] clients. You're gonna have to have heads of departments and there's a whole other skillset involved with that. And I never thought we would get here. I.

Brian: Put off for the longest time hiring full-time employees, and it was one of the best decisions I made. I have no regrets on it, and I, love my team. so just know that you can start small and work your way up, and you can always decide you don't. If it's not for you, it's not for you. But that's all I got for you today on this episode.

Brian: Shorter episode. But I think it's an insightful one for those of you who are kind of in that, pivotal moment where you're trying to figure out, do I want to be an agency model? Do I wanna try micro agency? Do I wanna dip my toe in this? If so, what is kinda limiting factor? How do I get myself out of this thing where I'm so damn busy I can't take any more work?

Brian: It's a good place to be, but it is a, real struggle, real challenge. 'cause I've been there in my career not every business model has that ability, but I've seen just about every industry do. One of our clients we just took on, a very large studio, recording studio in Denver, and I thought for the longest in the recording studio space, there's not really an agency model to kind of go after.

Brian: cause that's my background is 10 years as a music producer mixing engineer. Now my thought was always, it's kinda a specialist thing. And the way to graduate from simple freelancer in that world is to [00:25:00] go into the education space, which is what I did. And that is a viable path too.

Brian: You can always go into the education space if you wanna teach kind of the craft that you've, honed over the years. But they've proven they have a team of five people at their studio. They have multiple rooms and multiple facilities. They have probably the highest revenue I've seen for a recording studio, and they're crushing it.

Brian: So that to me proves that the kind of agency or micro agency model worked in that world. And if it can work in that world that I know it works in other worlds. 'cause the studio world is one that's, you know, had a lot of challenge and struggle over the years as label budgets have dropped as home recording studio people like myself things more challenging for traditional studios.

Brian: Uh, still can be done.

Brian: so, if you're in this position where you are wanting to make that leap. Truth be told, Our coaching program is probably not the best one for you. We focus on client acquisition. So when you've made the leap, you've hired people out and you're ready to start taking on more clients, which is kind of where these other people are.

Brian: They've already scaled out and now they just want more clients to put fuel on the fire of something that's already working. That's where we specialize and help you at. But if you're trying to make that leap, there's probably other programs that other people out there better suited to helping you hire and train and delegate and all those sorts of things.

Brian: 'cause that's not necessarily our specialty, what we help [00:26:00] with. I can't help with that. I have tons of experience with that at this point. But there are other people that have way more experience who have specialized programs to help with that. So I'll just say, that's not necessarily for me, but if you want more clients maybe you're not fully booked up yet as a freelancer, or maybe you have finally made that leap and you are an agency where you are trying to get more clients to fill up the roster of all your team members at this point.

Brian: 'cause now you have. More mouths to feed. If that's you, we can help. Just go to six figure creative.com/coaching. We will walk you through our process. We will create a full roadmap for you. We'll pitch it to you. If you love it, you can approve it and we'll coach you month to month. Cancel any time. If you hate it, then we will refund every single penny you've paid us.

Brian: and we part ways. As friends and you do not have to work with us. So that's the easiest way I found is we create a plan for you. And if we can shake hands on it and say this is a good plan, then we move forward and continue to work together. And if you don't like the plan, I don't wanna work with you 'cause you don't wanna work with us.

Brian: 'cause it won't work at that point. We know it will not work. So that's all I got for you this episode in the six Figure Creative podcast. I will see you next week. Goodbye.