You’re the Bottleneck — Here’s the Fix | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

360. Multi-6 figure playbook pt 5_Systems That Multiply Your Output (Without Hiring a Team)

===

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the fifth episode in this series that I'm calling the Multi six Figure Freelancer Playbook.

Brian: And as you scale into six figures and you're trying to get to multi-six figures, you're gonna feel multiple times where you are the bottleneck of the business. Everything goes through you every single person, every single thing is held up because of you. That is gonna be super normal.

Brian: As you grow, it never really goes away. You just get to different levels of always being the bottleneck. But in the early stages, the first few times you hit this, which is uh, 75,000, a hundred thousand a year, 150,000 a year, definitely once you get into 200 to 50,000 a year, depending on your pricing and your structure and your model and all that, as you get to those, thresholds and you become the bottleneck, you're gonna start dropping the ball on a lot of things.

Brian: You're gonna forget to follow up with people. You're gonna forget to send things to people. You're gonna lose emails from people. you're gonna delay deliverables to clients. You're going to spend weekends trying to catch up on things. and so projects just always feel chaotic. It's because you're doing your admin 15 different ways. There's no consistency there. You're doing every single project from scratch because you're a nice creative who wants to be creative in all things. And so everything has to be unique in all ways.

Brian: I.

Brian: And you've been avoiding building out proper systems in your business [00:01:00] because you just don't have time. So you always feel like you'd never have time to invest in those sorts of things, which you never will if you don't actually take the time to do it.

Brian: And so, not only are you the creative behind your business, you're the project manager, you're the CFO, you're the account manager, you're the admin, you're your own personal assistant in this case. And so when this happens, your brain is doing all of this work that your system should be doing for you.

Brian: And when this happens, you cap how much you can earn because you physically can't take on more work. You end up again, dropping the ball on clients, thus diminishing your trust. There's a reason that freelancers generally have sketchy reputations because we just tend to drop the ball and erode the trust that we've built up with our clients over time.

Brian: you can't take time off because my God, why would you take time off? You have too much to do, thus leading to burnout. And then to top it all off, you're stuck in a business that's just busy, busy all the time. Miserable to run, but it's not smart. And the irony is the more you systemize, the more you can actually focus on being a creative.

Brian: because think about this. How can you be creative when you're [00:02:00] constantly stressed out? waking up in the middle of the night, thinking through, I forgot to send that email. I forgot to send this project off at 3:00 AM You can't go back to sleep.

Brian: Now you're sending emails at 3:00 AM because you forgot to and you dropped the ball. how can he possibly be creative when that's happening? When clients are constantly mad at you, when you are constantly spending time just looking for shit that you lost, because you never label things or organize things correctly.

Brian: This part of running a business is not fun.

Brian: I think you and I can agree to that. So instead, let's talk about Three main systems. You need to break through that plateau that you're at right now, where you're the bottleneck and scale up to that next level, whatever that is for you.

Brian: For most people listening to this series, it's people that want to break into that multi six figure range. And the best part of this episode is I'm not gonna try to get you to hire someone. If you want a hiring guide, you want me to yell at you, talk you into hiring people for your business, go back to episode 3 55, you're booked solid. Now what the real reason you're stuck at a hundred k,

Brian: but whether you're hiring, which is again, a great thing once you're past a hundred k, not where we can talk about this episode, or you're just trying to systemize and build out these three systems. If you can do this well, you're gonna earn more money per hour, which is the goal for a lot of people listening to this, [00:03:00] not just series, but this podcast in general.

Brian: You're gonna fewer drop balls, which means less stress, happier clients more time to be creative, and then ultimately a more enjoyable business, which is what we all want here. It's a business that we can enjoy to run. We can be creative. Let's build the systems out that allow you to be creative.

Brian: So before I get into the topic today, if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative Podcast. This podcast is for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. One of the best ways to do that is to systemize your business.

Brian: I take a live influence and inspiration from industries outside of just the freelance world, but also within the different sub-industries and sub niches within the freelance world. There's a lot of you that listen to the show, a lot of different industries, and I love taking things that I've learned elsewhere and bringing to this podcast to help you because at the end of the day, we don't wanna homogenous what I call an inbred business where there's no diversity, there's no outside influence.

Brian: Those are horrible businesses to run. Take best practices from other industries and apply them to your business. If you want it better, more profitable, happier, better to run business. So let's talk about the three systems to build out.

Brian: The first system is a client onboarding [00:04:00] system. I have a whole episode on this back in episode 293, which was January 4th, 2024. So well over a year ago. It was part of our Infinite Client series and the episode was titled The Five Step Blueprint for Perfect Client Onboarding. If you wanna hear that episode, just go to six figure creative.com/ 2 9 3. Just those three numbers at the end of the URL and that'll take you straight to the show notes page of that episode where you can watch the video or listen to the audio, whatever you want to do.

Brian: that will give you a really good step by step of every single thing to do from start to finish. What I wanna talk about here

Brian: is several things that I think a lot of freelancers are missing, especially once they get to that six figure trying to break into multi six figure range. And our goal here is to create a seamless, pro-level client experience before the work even starts. Because if you can. Startup project well, it will likely run itself well and end well.

Brian: And also it impresses your clients if you can do this well

Brian: and added bonus, it's not just for the client, it's also for you. It, eliminates some of the repetitive pointless admin that you'll have to do if you don't have a good onboarding process. So there's a few things I want to make sure you have in your onboarding [00:05:00] process, preferably automated, which talk a little bit about, we've talked about length before.

Brian: So I'm not gonna go too much into the depth about this, but I just wanna make sure you have these things in your business. First is proposal slash contract templates.

Brian: On episode two of this series I talked about uh, service that scales. And that means that you're not doing custom quotes. You're not just custom bespoke project every single time. you're closer to that spectrum of productized service than you are that fully bespoke, customized service that can work.

Brian: But it's just infinitely more complicated if you're gonna do it that way. And you gotta have a really high value client if you wanna make that work. For the people I'm talking to here, most freelancers that I have seen scale past multiple six figures, are not doing it on custom bespoke, everything's unique type projects.

Brian: They're doing it on some sort of systemized, productized service, which means we ditch these custom quotes with custom proposals. Everything should be relatively templatized for this. And even in some productized services, this can be a challenge

Brian: because there can be some variables. But I say at worst use what we call modular pricing. Modular pricing means in order to give the client the outcome that they want through the service or package that you offer, you have a [00:06:00] set base package and then all the little extra deliverables that they might need.

Brian: You add 'em on as little modules doing it this way makes it to where you just have these little building blocks. You have the main big building block everyone gets, and you have the small little building blocks you can add onto it. And when you do it that way you can easily have a starter template for contracts, easily have a starter template for your proposals, easily have a starter template for your pricing structure so you can talk numbers on a call really quickly versus trying to come up with these custom quotes because you can just put it together in seconds.

Brian: It can be as easy as having a contract with, every single thing that I do is in there and I can just delete the parts that I don't need for this specific client. Or it can be as easy as, depending on the type of software you're using, having a starter template for a proposal or for a contract, and then just adding in sub templates based on the modules, quote modules that that client needs in the project.

Brian: To send a proposal if you use those. I don't even think most freelancers even need to use proposals if you have a good sales process. But if you do use proposals and you hide behind proposals or you just follow up with the proposals after you've talked numbers with a client on a call, which you should always [00:07:00] do, you've talked numbers on the discovery call or the sales call you follow up a proposal so it's all written down so they can see it all.

Brian: Great. Sending a proposal like that and sending the contract after that should take you no more than five to 10 minutes, And when I'm working with clients and I see how much time they're spending on these sorts of things, 30 minutes, four, five minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours in some cases, that is insane.

Brian: that is no way to scale. you're not getting paid for that.

Brian: So that's the first part of onboarding, to make sure you have a system that is easy to deploy, if not fully automated. Next is invoicing and payments that are just handled automatically. If you're using something like Dodo or go high level, both of which I've used, both of those can send invoices to clients.

Brian: They can pay through credit card, debit card, PayPal in some cases Square or maybe in :Venmo in some of these cases, and I know they can do bank transfers as well. And I know the cool thing about go high level, I'll just call it GHL, is if you use that you can actually set the invoice so that it only allows bank transfers.

Brian: So if you're doing a large amount of money, like 30, 40, $50,000, the highest fee you'll pay is five bucks versus the 3% fee, [00:08:00] which for $50,000 purchase could be.

Brian: $1,500, which is a lot.

Brian: So make sure your invoicing is automated, not just sending things out when they need to go out. It could be that you had a sales conversation, the client agreed to it, they're going to pay it. You can just quickly send the invoice. And then all the recurring reminders to pay the invoice on the due date, before the due date, after the due due date.

Brian: Things are past due. That's all done within the system. So you don't have to remember to do any of this stuff. You don't have to manually do any of this stuff. The only thing you have to do is just make sure that if it gets through all the automated reminders, you can then follow up manually,

Brian: The third part of your onboarding system that you wanna make sure you have is intake form to gather all the information before you get on the kickoff call. And I talk about this in detail on episode 2 93, so go back and listen to that.

Brian: But the point of this is the last thing you want to do is to get on a kickoff call with a client and not have all the information you need in order to have a good kickoff call. So what will end up happening is you'll get on a kickoff call, you're asking questions you should have already had in advance, so you spend time gathering information versus planning out the project.

Brian: So it sucks for the client to spend an hour and a half, two hours on a call just gathering information, just [00:09:00] info dumping to you, and you're just trying to take all this information and synthesize it and turn it into something that's going to be a plan for the project. That's a huge waste of time.

Brian: Knowledge transfer is horrible in a synchronous environment where you're in real time knowledge transfer. No. That's asynchronous work. send them intake form or a client questionnaire that goes out before the kickoff call gathers all the information.

Brian: You go through it before the call. Make sure you have everything you need. Follow up with the client before they get on the kickoff call. And that way the kickoff call is all about planning forward for the project, not just trying to gather information.

Brian: the next part of a good multi-six figure onboarding system is an automated welcome packet with onboarding guide or checklist at six expectations. So basically it's either a PDF or you could do a Notion Doc. I love notion, now I'm a power user at this point, but the document should have a timeline that sets expectations with the client for when things will happen, when they're due, to send you things, when you're going to send them things, how long they should take to send you back things like revisions, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: And if done correctly, should be the full start to finish timeline for the entire project.

Brian: It should also have [00:10:00] communication boundaries. So how can the client contact you? How should they contact you? What are the expectations there? What can they not do? Can they text? You shouldn't be able to text you.

Brian: How can they give you feedback? What is the format for feedback? How can they give it to you in a way that's constructive and actually helpful? What are the next steps for them once they've joined? Again, this is the kickoff. This is like when they first started onboarding. What are the next steps? What can they expect coming up?

Brian: So they have full clarity on how it's all gonna play out.

Brian: Remember I said this in an earlier episode, I think it was episode one of the series. You own the process. They simply follow it. You are the expert. You're the person they're going to to get the outcome that they want. And if you're selling full true transformational outcomes, then you should have a set process that the client follows in order to get that outcome.

Brian: You are the expert in this domain. And if they don't trust you enough to follow it, either they're a horrible client or you didn't do a good enough job setting the frame at the very start, that this is the process that gets all of your past clients the results that this client now came to you for.

Brian: the last thing that's just kinda a bonus you can include in this welcome packet is a checklist called a kickoff checklist. Whatever you want. It's a [00:11:00] list of all the things that they owe you as far as assets or copy or. Files or whatever, and then all of the things that you owe them before kickoff, or it can even be what you're gonna owe them as far as deliverables, just so there's more clarity there.

Brian: Now, this sounds like a lot of stuff, but if you have a good CRM, like the ones we set up all of our clients with, which is a white labeled version of go high level. If you have a good system, it can automate almost all of this. All these things can be automated, sent out on the appropriate time based on when certain things were booked.

Brian: You can base things based on other systems that you're using. Like If you mark a certain thing done in Clickup, your project management software or whatever, you use Trello, when that gets marked as done, it'll automatically send an email in your CRM to the client updating certain things. There's a lot you can do with this.

Brian: But the best thing to do is just think through this. If you have a brain like mine, which is like a very systems oriented brain, use a tool called whimsical to map out, essentially like a mind map. It's called a flow chart. If your brain doesn't work well with flowcharts, just think of it as a linear chart that you go through that says, if this happens, then this happens.

Brian: It's good for building out automations so you can [00:12:00] visually see it, which can be very when you're trying to tie multiple systems together, because if you have a CRM that does one thing and a project management system that does another thing, and maybe your invoicing, your payments tool could be a third thing.

Brian: All these things can be tied together. We'll talk about tools later on in this episode, but that one thing, whimsical, it's free. We use it all the time for all of our flow charts. That can be wonderful for mapping out a visual of how these things all flow together and tied together for your onboarding systems.

Brian: And one more thing to talk about here, and this is something I didn't talk about in that old onboarding episode Episode 2 93, the Five Step Blueprint for Perfect Client Onboarding. I didn't mention this in that episode, but I think this is a good addition to that. And that is a client dashboard.

Brian: This is something where the client can see everything that they need to see related to the project. It's just a place to keep up with everything. Deliverables, communication, whatever. There's standalone systems that do this stuff. You can build out your own version of this in something like Notion or Trello or Clickup.

Brian: I don't have a go-to one that I recommend everyone use, but this is something worth exploring. We have a couple clients that are testing out a couple specialty softwares and different niches that are good for like client portals and client dashboards. So if I find something that I love, I'll bring it [00:13:00] to you on the podcast.

Brian: But just know that's a thing that can be helpful for clarity. 'cause think about the use case for this. A client dashboard is something that they can go check. That shows them maybe the status of a project, maybe a percentage line certain elements or what's coming up or what's already done, or what files are available, or a place for 'em to upload things or download things, just basically, again, a place to keep up everything.

Brian: And the reason this matters is because they have clarity on is happening. The worst thing you can do is leave your clients in the dark where they have no idea what's happening.

Brian: And that's actually one of the systems we're gonna talk about is a communication system. But that's not the next one yet. We'll get to that in a second. So the first system is a good client onboarding system. And on top of what I just talked about, go back to episode 293 for that five step blueprint, for perfect line onboarding.

Brian: if this is an area you struggle with,

Brian: the next thing is a project delivery system.

Brian: The goal here is to create work faster, get it done smoother, get it done on time consistently with a repeatable process.

Brian: And like I said, if you do this well, this is not gonna limit you as a creative. This is actually gonna free up more brain space so that you can use all that brain space for creative tasks instead [00:14:00] of barely holding on with a thread.

Brian: So the first thing is project templates. And when I say project templates, I mean project management templates. These are things like clickup, Trello, notion, whatever you prefer. All three tools can be great. I use clickup. I love notion for lighter project management. Trello. I have a friend who runs a multi six figure business.

Brian: Specifically outta Trello. Actually, I have multiple people I know that run multi six figure businesses out of Trello. Trello is a little easier to get started with, but it's also very powerful.

Brian: But the reason project templates like this are powerful is because especially the more productized service you have is that you can say when a new project is closed, NGHL, my CRM, when a new project is closed, create a new project in Clickup from this template based on this specific template and that template can have everything to deliver the entire project start to finish.

Brian: once you map it out one time, you create a template and you're done. You can even create multiple templates depending on client type. So you can get as fancy as. I'll use a specific example based on my background. So this is easier to conceptualize, for reference, my background is over a decade in music production and I [00:15:00] specifically worked with heavy metal bands, so a little fun fact for you, You can do things like, when project is closed in my crm and the project type is a mixing project Then create a project in Trello from the mixing template. Could also say if it's a full production project where they're coming into the studio with me and we're doing full production editing, tracking, mixing, mastering everything.

Brian: It can be like, if the project is full production, then use the full production template in Trello. So you can do it per service type or per package. You can even do it with like your modular pricing. That can be a little more complicated. All this to say, you can automate it and you can do it based on certain dates.

Brian: So you can say the start date for this project is June 3rd, and based on that being the start date, it will dynamically update all of the future dates for the entire project, start to finish, and populate it and assign it to you or whoever else is on your team so that everyone gets assigned tasks in their inbox on that day to remind them of what they're gonna be doing that day and if you follow that, you will never forget anything.

Brian: It's an external brain for you.

Brian: So that handles the project management side of things. But we also need deliverable frameworks and deliverable frameworks [00:16:00] can look completely different depending on what industry you're in and what services you offer. But it can be things like content templates, design systems, strategy docs. It can be an audio world, it can be DA templates, it can be different drum samples you use for specific genres.

Brian: anything that makes the start of the project easier. So my background in music production, I had different, basically pro tools templates for different genres and sub genres so that I knew if it was this type of band, I could use this starter template. If it was that type of band, I would use that starter template.

Brian: And even if I started from a same or similar template every time, the end product would still be completely different because I'm adjusting and, changing things all along. It just is a good starter point for me. The last thing I wanna do is start from scratch on any given project. Now, if you try to serve too many services, too many types of clients, you can see how complicated this gets because now you have to have starter templates for 15, 20 different types of clients, or you get one of those random one-off clients that you've never had before.

Brian: You have to start it off from scratch. That can be horribly time consuming. So you can start to see the power of niching down and specializing and how serving one type of client makes things more scalable.

Brian: But whatever it is, if it's specific video [00:17:00] templates, if it's specific design templates, things that lets you work faster, more efficiently to do a lot of the like legwork to get it up to a baseline so that all you're doing is taking it from baseline to amazing. That is a great way to save time.

Brian: The next thing within the project delivery system is making sure you just have good file structure. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people with horrible file structure that ruins projects because you can't find what you need to find when you need to find it.

Brian: So I'm gonna give you exactly what I do, exactly what I recommend. And that is Dropbox. First of all, Dropbox, a hundred percent. Nothing else even comes close for a billion reasons. My favorite reasons are this. You can use what they call selective sync. that means that every file for every project I've ever done is on my computer right now to search.

Brian: It's indexable. I can search for it, but it's not living on my hard drive. It's just like a one kilobyte file with the name of the actual file. And I can right click it and I can say, sync to this computer. And then it will quickly download 'cause I have Google Fiber. So it'll quickly download the project size, even if it's 20, 30, 40, 50 gigs.

Brian: Quickly download it. And it'll be accessible on my computer to open up. And that means that my long-term archive, yes, I still have physical hard drives for backup purposes, [00:18:00] but I still keep everything in Dropbox because the Dropbox business plan I have has unlimited storage. So I have terabytes and terabytes, audio, video, all sorts of things on there over the years.

Brian: It makes it easy to share, collaborate, whatever.

Brian: But even if you don't use Dropbox for whatever reason, please God, don't use Google Drive. But even if you don't use Dropbox the way I structure things through is this one master folder for all projects.

Brian: here's how some people do. I'll just tell you. They'll do like. different folders for each service. And then within that service they'll have the client names. So you might have a client in service A and that same client in service B.

Brian: Horrible way to organize things. Start with the client. That's the one universal thing that doesn't change. And within the client name folder, then put under that The service or services or the project rather for that specific client. ' so it could be client name. Underneath that is mixing project July, 2024.

Brian: Within that folder, I generally have separate folders for that specific project. So it could be files that I got from the client, it can be project specific files that I need for the actual deliverables. So in audio, there's tons of stuff that you're recording or editing or [00:19:00] changing, live in the files for pro tools.

Brian: Then you might have a folder for revisions process. So as you're bouncing files, sending things to clients, getting feedback, which we'll talk about in a second, you are bouncing it to your, revisions folder or early mixes folder or early work folder. And then making sure you're naming every single file appropriately for your naming condition.

Brian: So you have version control so you know what each version is, and then having a proper folder for your final stuff. And in the final project folder, there's only ever the final project deliverables. So you never have to search through all project deliverables to find the most recent one.

Brian: It is just one folder for all final files, and nothing ever is in that folder. That is not a final file to be delivered. So if you ever update anything. You remove it from that folder or you move it to a sub folder when that called archive. So you might have, your hierarchy looks similar to this one big project folder with everything in it.

Brian: Within that project folder is the specific client name. Within that folder is the specific project. So July, 2025 or whatever. And within that project you have the different folders for the project, [00:20:00] including final files. And in the final file folder, you might have an archive folder for old versions of stuff, whatever you prefer.

Brian: But the goal is you never have to search for the final files. No matter when you did it, no matter how long ago it was. If you've done this correctly, you can go to a project that's eight years ago, go into the client name, go into the specific project they did.

Brian: So if you've done seven projects, whether you know it's the one from August, 2015 or whatever. You go into that folder and then you know, in that it's just the final files folder.

Brian: The reason I'm spending so much time on this is because it's so easy to lose shit. As a freelancer, you lose files. You didn't name things properly. You have a haphazard organization. If you just create a standard framework and structure for how you organize your files, it makes your life so much easier.

Brian: The next part of your project delivery system should be clear feedback and approval process. Nothing is worse than getting garbage feedback from your clients and having an unclear approval process where they come back and change their mind 10 times. That's horrible. It's not scalable will,

Brian: so I recommend having structured revision rounds. So generally what I did with clients is three rounds of revisions only. Past that point, it's [00:21:00] paid. And the reason I did pass that point it's paid is because generally what I've seen is after three rounds, it's not productive. The client's going back on what they said, they're changing their mind, they're hemming and hawing, and it ends up making the project not just drawn out but worse.

Brian: The project quality starts to diminish because we start nitpicking on stuff that doesn't matter. usually out of fear for the client more than it is anything else. And yes, I would do free revisions after three rounds. If I messed something up, let's just say they asked for something that I missed or I didn't do it right, something that's my fault.

Brian: Yeah, I'll do four rounds or five rounds in those cases. But generally, once we get past three rounds, I charge, the added benefit of this is when you have limited revisions, it forces the client to take each round seriously. They're not just gonna send you one email one night with a info dump of all the crap they wanna change or even a partial change list, and then the next morning or then later that day, sending you another email of all these things to change.

Brian: I know it goes into one list of things, one round. and so just a pro tip, if there's multiple stakeholders for revisions, make one person the go-to person everyone else has to filter through, and only that person communicates with you. So they're the ones in charge of [00:22:00] gathering all the revisions from everyone, submitting them to you, and then you communicate back with that specific person on everything.

Brian: That way there's not conflicting revisions from multiple people. So structure revision rounds. So three rounds only is what I recommend. The next part of clear feedback and approval process is making sure your clients understand how to give good feedback. What's the proper structure?

Brian: And if the clients don't follow that structure or that medium, how they actually supposed to send that feedback to you. If they don't do it properly, don't be afraid to push back. There are many times where I tell the client, Hey, you didn't follow my guide on how to actually structure these revisions.

Brian: Here it is again, please organize this based on what I showed you. Get back to me, I'll get these done.

Brian: So I would consider using something like if you're using video frame.io if you're doing audio file pass.com, if you're doing design web or graphic, you can do Figma using comments for that. Google Docs, if you're doing, copy, any of these sorts of tools that are specialized for specific mediums are wonderful and the reason is the feedback is.

Brian: Timestamped if it's audio or video or it's at a specific spot with a comment right where it needs to be. So there's no second guessing. The worst thing you could ever try to deal with [00:23:00] is someone trying to explain what they mean. So I'll give you an audio example because it's just easy ' cause I understand this so well.

Brian: When someone says we need the second kick drum in the third verse on the upbeat turned up slightly, or there's a double hit right here at the third chorus on the fifth beat. Things like that are awful to try to dissect an understand. It's just so much brain power.

Brian: Whereas with File pass, they can just leave a timestamp comment at that specific moment in time that says, Hey, this is a double hick. Can you fix that? Easy to understand

Brian: Frame IO is the same. Figma is similar. But these specialty tools make feedback so much easier for my audio people. One thing I also did that saved me a ton of time was I could do this in my niche. Not all niches can do this. I put all my songs in one long session,

Brian: and the reason I did this was because I just had one long session to load and that one long 30, 40, 50, 60 minute session had every single thing in it. And so when I sent it to the client, I would just send one long track and they could give me all the feedback in one document with timestamps on it. This is pre-file pass and all the timestamp comments I could go through and I could do all [00:24:00] the drum revisions, all the guitar revisions, all the vocal revisions start to finish for the entire project in one session without having to load or unload or change things.

Brian: It was wonderful.

Brian: And finally, whenever you have actually. Finish the project, make sure you have a clear deliverable checklist for yourself so you know you are always sending the right files, the right way, the right formats all the handoff documents that you need. And ideally this is kinda a bonus if you want to send a, short loom video.

Brian: It just goes over everything for the final deliverables. Here's what I'm sending, here's what it is,

Brian: here's walking me through this. through that so they, can understand every single file and folder. Especially for more complex projects where there might be multiple deliverables, it takes you no more than five minutes and it's just a nice added bonus. Especially when you're doing a long project with this very complex, it's multi thousand, tens of thousands of dollars, five minutes is nothing.

Brian: So that's the second system to build out is a good project delivery system. There's lots of components with that, but depending on what your bottleneck is right now, that could be a really good, valuable use of your time. ' cause most freelancers spend most of their time on delivery. So that might be the place that I start.

Brian: And the third and final system we'll talk about in this episode is communication systems. With the [00:25:00] goal of this part being stay outta your inbox. Manage client expectations and avoid scope creep or those like, hey, quick question, kind of chaos.

Brian: Those things that can eat up your time all day long. So straight up front set communication expectations. Put it in your onboarding document, in your contract and your sales conversation even. But just make sure your client understands them and agrees to them,

Brian: this should be how long can they expect before you reply to them. And I recommend 12 to 24 hours I recommend 24 hours. 'cause if you do it faster than that, great. if you're off one day or you have a lot, you're slammed one day. You don't have to check your email multiple times a day.

Brian: Make sure you set revision windows, how long it takes to do revisions, not just on your end, but their end set. Any sort of meeting limits that you have. So you might say I'm available for up to one hours a month of meetings. This is especially important for recurring clients. If you have a retainer or a subscription type pricing model where there is synchronous time involved first, see if you even need that.

Brian: 'cause a lot of times you don't need the synchronous time, but if you do need synchronous face-to-face time, make sure you set hard limits on how long this can go and how much it's [00:26:00] going to be. If it takes longer than that. I've seen freelancers learn this the hard way, where they work with a client who wants them on a bunch of meetings and it sucks up their time and it's stuff they don't even need to be on.

Brian: Or if it's stuff they need to be on, it needs to be accounted for in the project Pricing.

Brian: it should also outline when you reply what channels you use. Is it email? Is it another system like Slack? And then what's off limits, which should be things like your phone. If they have your phone number, they shouldn't be calling you.

Brian: this is not just to be mean or anything. It's honestly to keep everything in one place. If you set one place, let's just say it's only email, you can only contact me through email. That's all we do. Email, and then one meeting per month on Zoom. Then you always know where something is.

Brian: If you're looking for something that's written, it's gonna be an email. If you're looking for a past meeting and its in your Zoom recordings folder. That's it. You don't have to search 30 different places like dms on social media, your text messages, slack, email, WhatsApp, Tinder.

Brian: And one other communication expectation is just setting the expectation for asynchronous updates. So it could be that weekly loom video or email summaries of what you've done,

Brian: especially for longer projects. Just having that weekly [00:27:00] update and kind of this rhythm it's wonderful. Friday Loom video or Monday summary can be like, here's what we did, here's what's next. So you know what's coming up. Here's what we need from you. if it actually applies to them and it keeps everyone on the same page without meanings. And the biggest thing about this little weekly cadence is it keeps your client's anxiety down.

Brian: Think about it from their perspective. this is how freelancers roll. A lot of times client pays thousands of dollars to the freelancer. Freelancer does a wonderful onboarding process. 'cause you follow this podcast and you've been like, oh, I've, been doing Brian's five step perfect onboarding client process for a long time.

Brian: my onboarding process is dialed in. Clients like, this is great. This person has their shit together. Then you go off into your dark cave and start working on the deliverables and it takes you six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks to do the work. ' cause you're trying to juggle seven different projects or whatever, you're making great progress.

Brian: You're so happy with how it's turning out. And the client, after a week, two weeks, three weeks, without hearing from you, they start getting antsy. Four weeks, God, this just take my money and run like, what's going on here?

Brian: They start making up stories in their head. They start. Talking to other people about it and they're feeding into that [00:28:00] anxiety and pretty soon you have a panic email from them. you can avoid all of that by just having weekly updates. They'll let the client know, here's what happened, here's what's next. Here's what I need from you.

Brian: Best part is if you use something like Clickup, you can even automate all these updates for you. You can do something like, when I mark when I mark this task is done, send an email to the client letting 'em know that this thing has been done. You can set templates for this so it can be like, Hey Mr.

Brian: And Mrs. Client. I just wrapped up this part of the project, excited how it turns out. I'll have something for you to see or hear or watch, in the next couple weeks.

Brian: It, so that's the weekly update rhythm for longer projects. But one other thing you need, depending on the length and the scope of the project, is potentially an asynchronous client. Communication hub.

Brian: Email's fine, especially for shorter projects. But some projects they require so much back and forth and so much especially multiple people looking at stuff, you need something more robust. You can't just do CC'd emails with 5, 6, 7, 10 people involved. And especially longer term projects. Email just breaks down.

Brian: It's so easy to miss stuff. If someone doesn't hit reply, all that can go out the window too. So I recommend [00:29:00] using a tool called Twist. You can also use Slack. I like twist so much better. It's what we use with our clients. The reason I like it is because it's like Slack had a baby with an old school message board.

Brian: It's modern, up to date, cool design works really well, has a mobile and desktop and browser view. the reason I like it the most is you don't have just a long stream of real time conversations like you have in Slack. There is no mis notifications like you have in Slack. The reason I like Twist is there is just one inbox and you can have 5, 10, 15, a hundred channels.

Brian: You can have a channel for every one of your clients even. But the only thing that shows in your inbox is a new comment on a thread that you're a part of. And when you read that comment, it's still in your inbox. If you don't have to market as unread consistently, like you do in Slack, it's always in your inbox.

Brian: And only once you mark it as done does it leave your inbox. So it's similar to email in that regard where you're essentially archiving emails, but it's so much easier to keep inbox zero because it's only project related stuff. There's no other email crap in there, clogging it up. And also the things that are in your inbox, all of these things, these are threads.

Brian: So you might have a specific topic [00:30:00] you're talking about. Let's talk about this design briefing. Let's talk about the overall test mix. We're testing out for this. Here's the first look at the coloring for the video. And it is just that specific topic, and you can have asynchronous conversations back and forth about that topic.

Brian: That's why it's more like an old school message board. And then when you're done with that, thread, you just close it and start a new one for the next thing. So it really centralizes things and it's all searchable and easy to find in the future. If you ever need to go back and look for something.

Brian: So those are the parts of a good communication system and that can save you tons of time, tons and tons of time. When it comes to more complex projects and freelancers, you have very little contact with your clients. This is not a problem. So if this's the case communication system is not where I'm gonna start with you, other freelancers, you have clients that have tons of communication in back and forth and it's really easy to lose things and you might have multiple stakeholders that are involved.

Brian: That's where your communication systems and a tool like Twist can be really helpful. So let's talk about tools. Speaking of that I talked about Twist and I'm just gonna reiterate some of the things I talked about in this episode. But some of the tools that I like make all this stuff simple is notion.

Brian: I use Notion four note taking. We use it for storing databases of [00:31:00] things. You can use it for client portals, you can use it for lighter project management. SOPs. We love it for SOPs.

Brian: You can even collaborate with clients within it. Another tool that's worth using or looking into is Clickup, Trello, or Asana. I already talked about these at length. I have tons of experience in Clickup. I love it. Asana. My wife use and she loves, from what I've seen her use of Asana. It's very similar to Clickup, almost feature Perry.

Brian: They're probably you know, competing with each other pretty heavily. Trello's kind of the older school one that, that's been around for forever. It's probably easier to get into, but it's still really powerful as far as automations and things you can build out in there. I think it's a little quicker, it's a little snappier than Clickup.

Brian: Clickup can be a little clunky and slow, so I would only use Clickup if you are working on very slow moving big projects. If you're working on fast moving smaller projects, notion's probably the one you wanna go with. The next tool is Loom. One of my favorite tools, loom basically is just a screen sharing tool where you can make screen share videos. You can make videos of just your face. You can do screen share with your face in the bottom corner.

Brian: You've probably seen or heard of this, but the reason I love this tool is it's the [00:32:00] easiest way to send quick videos to people. And we use this in our company religiously, not just with our clients, but we use it internally with our team because we're a distributed team amongst many time zones in many countries, and we're not all on Slack at the same time.

Brian: Which by the way, I still use Slack for this company only because we use Twist with our clients. If we didn't use Twist with our clients, I would use Twist with the company as well. But the one thing that sucks with Twist is using multiple accounts at the same time. Like one for the company, one for clients.

Brian: Really difficult to use for multiple clients. It's easy to miss stuff. So we don't, we don't do that unfortunately. but I hate Slack, but Loom makes everything much better for asynchronous work.

Brian: And one of my favorite features of this is it transcribes all of your videos, right? since it transcribes all your videos, it knows how many words you've spoken. So in the top right corner of Loom, if you go in there, it sends you a report and it shows you every single week on a week by week report, how many words you've spoken that week In Loom videos we average like 50 to a hundred thousand words a week on Loom.

Brian: Each of us. On top of that, it shows you your percentage of filler words. So we always compete on who can have the least amount of filler words. And I hover between one and 2% of my words [00:33:00] being filler words, usually on the 1% side. ' cause I've been working on that.

Brian: The next tool that makes this easier is Zapier, or Make, make.com. These are automation tools. So you can essentially think about it this way. Your CRM likely does not talk to your project management tool.

Brian: They're not compatible with each other. There's no integration with those two things. go high level does not integrate with Clickup. Neither does, Dato.

Brian: if you ever went those two to, quote, talk to each other, Zapier or make.com is how you make that happen. It is the translator between certain things. So you can send things from GHL to Zapier and then take that information and then send it over to your project management tool of choice or vice versa.

Brian: A common use case here. Easy one would be when the project closes, when the client has paid in GHL, start the project in clickup, load it from the template, get everything going. Notify whoever needs to be notified if they have a new project added to their calendars or whatever.

Brian: Another one we use is called I Greatly. We use that for a few things. It has some deeper integrations with a few tools, so it's worth looking into if for some reason the tool you're trying to use doesn't do what you want it to use. [00:34:00] again, we use all three, but all three. Work pretty well.

Brian: Zapier is the leading one though, and it can be pricey. The last few here is tools I've already mentioned ad nauseum, so I'll breeze through these. One is go high level or GHL. That's the CRM we use as the CRM. We white labeled and built out a bunch of infrastructure from the ground up for our clients to use so they don't have to start from scratch.

Brian: Otherwise, if you go to sign up on DHL's website. You'll have basically a blank canvas. You have to build out yourself and it is daunting. It's a lot of work. I know this because I built out all this stuff for my own company and all this stuff for our clients. So I can tell you right now, unless you have months to sit down and, build all this stuff out, you likely don't wanna start from scratch there.

Brian: So if you want our stuff it's not live yet, but we have a waiting list, six figure creative.com/crm, which you can sign up for that, but it's still worth looking into that tool. Thei is also fine. We use it for a while and it has a lot of limitations and can be frustrating. And it's clunking, it doesn't have a visual automation interface like Jhl does.

Brian: So it's really difficult and challenging to build out good complex automations, but it works fine and I made money with it. But that's for things like your CRM, so like. [00:35:00] understanding where your deals are in the, deal pipeline is for things like contracts, payments I think HoneyBook can work decently for some of this stuff too.

Brian: If you're a HoneyBook user is probably fine. But GHL goes above and beyond that. 'cause they, they don't just do that. They do your funnel software, your website software, they do forms surveys. They have a social media planner tool. they integrate with Facebook ads. They have full dashboards that show all the elements of your business.

Brian: your entire email list. So it's replaces things like active campaign or one of those other tools like MailChimp.

Brian: It has calendar tools like Calendly, although I actually think they're more powerful than Calendly because they integrate with so much other elements in GHL. But it's my all time favorite tool that we use in this business. And then finally, we talked about these already, frame.io or file pass.com, whether you're audio, video for collaboration tools, those standalone collaboration tools can save you a ton of time.

Brian: So that is it. Those are the three systems to build out a client onboarding system, a project delivery system, a communication system. All three of those will your time back so that you have more time to actually be creative, enjoy your business, have [00:36:00] less fires to put out, less pissed off clients, happier clients, actually clients that wanna come back to you.

Brian: Again, clients that wanna refer other clients to you so that you can have that infinite client loop that I talked about on the Infinite Client series.

Brian: But that's all I got for you today. If you don't have enough clients to even do these things with yet, and you're still trying to build up your client list to where your bottleneck is getting clients, it's not getting time back. If your bottleneck's time, this episode's great. If your bottleneck is getting enough clients so that this stuff now becomes important, then this is how I can help. Me and my team will build out an entire customized client acquisition strategy for you. We will pitch it to you. You can accept it or you can reject it, or we can revise it depending on what your needs are. If you reject it, we refund you. We part ways, you're out of no money whatsoever and there's no catch on this at all, and you ask for a refund.

Brian: From that point, we will give it to you. From there, if you accept it or approve it, we will coach you through implementing every single element of that.

Brian: And we put a guarantee on it that if you, actually implement these things and don't get at least $10,000 worth of new clients, we will coach you for free until you do. And we have done that and fulfilled on that promise for multiple, multiple clients. We have videos and kees of, [00:37:00] clients who have gone through that and have made many, many, many times back that.

Brian: One of those is Wilson Harwood. He came to us. He was on our ROI guarantee for months. He struggled with sales, was this big bottleneck in the process. We got him through that and he texted me at the end of last year crossing over 150 k. Uh, Another one is Steve Prince. He was on their ROI guarantee for a few months as well.

Brian: Struggling to get his paid ads to work, worked through all the bottlenecks and it's closed over 25, I think maybe 30, $40,000 this past quarter in new projects. So we are editing his case study right now. So it'll definitely be live by the time this episode airs. if you want our help with this, we have an awesome team.

Brian: The two coaches here are onboarding clients right now are both people who have run, not just multi-six figure businesses. One of our coaches that just taking on new clients right now has built a multimillion dollar per year agency, sold that off then helped other companies scale from three to 6 million.

Brian: So I've talked about 'em in the past episode, so I won't go too much detail here, but if you want to be coached by us, my team have some really cool people on our team. So just go to six figure creative.com/coaching, fill out the short questionnaire, see if it's a good fit. If so, we'll chat and uh, we'll move [00:38:00] forward.

Brian: So that's all I got for you this week. I'll see you next week on the six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace.

If you're looking for a past meeting, it's in your Zoom recordings folder. That's it, you, you don't have to search 30 different places like dms on social media, your text messages, slack, email, WhatsApp, Tinder, and one other communication expectation is just setting the expectation for asynchronous updates.

So it could be that weekly loom video or email summaries of what you've done, especially for longer projects. Just having that weekly update in kind of this rhythm is wonderful. Friday loom video or Monday summary can be like, here's what we did. Here's what's next, so you know what's coming up. Here's what we need from you, if it actually applies to them, and it keeps everyone on the same page without meetings.

The biggest thing about this little weekly cadence is it keeps your clients' anxiety down.

But whether you're hiring, which is again a great thing, you can do this well, you're gonna earn more money per hour, which is the goal for a lot of people listening to this. Not just this series, but this podcast in general. You're gonna have fewer drop balls, which means less stress, happier clients, more time to be creative, and then ultimately, a more enjoyable business, which is what we all want here.

It's a [00:39:00] business that we can enjoy to run. We can be creative. Let's build the systems out that allow you to be creative. Creative. So before I get into the topic today, if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian.

If you're looking for a past meeting, it's in your Zoom recordings folder. That's it, you, you don't have to search 30 different places like dms on social media, your text messages, slack, email, WhatsApp, Tinder, and one other communication expectation is just setting the expectation for asynchronous updates.

So it could be that weekly loom video or email summaries of what you've done, especially for longer projects. Just having that weekly update in kind of this rhythm is wonderful. Friday loom video or Monday summary can be like, here's what we did. Here's what's next, so you know what's coming up. Here's what we need from you, if it actually applies to them, and it keeps everyone on the same page without meetings.

The biggest thing about this little weekly cadence is it keeps your clients' anxiety down.

Lamb one day. You don't have to check your email multiple times a day. Choose that revision windows, how long it takes to do revisions, not just on your end, but their end set. Any sort of meeting limits that you have. So you might say, I'm available for up to one hours a month of meetings. This is [00:40:00] especially important for recurring clients if you have a retainer or a subscription type pricing model where there is.

Synchronous time involved first. See if you even need that. 'cause a lot of times you don't need the synchronous time, but if you do need synchronous face-to-face time, make sure you set hard limits on how long this can go and how much it's going to be. If it takes longer than that. I've seen freelancers learn this the hard way.

But whether you're hiring, which is again a great thing, you can do this well, you're gonna earn more money per hour, which is the goal for a lot of people listening to this. Not just this series, but this podcast in general. You're gonna have fewer drop balls, which means less stress, happier clients, more time to be creative, and then ultimately, a more enjoyable business, which is what we all want here.

It's a business that we can enjoy to run. We can be creative. Let's build the systems out that allow you to be creative. Creative. So before I get into the topic today, if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian.

But whether you're hiring, which is again a great thing, you can do this well, you're gonna earn more money per hour, which is the goal for a lot of people listening to this. Not just this series, but this podcast in general. You're gonna have fewer drop balls, which means less stress, happier clients, more time to be creative, and then ultimately, a more [00:41:00] enjoyable business, which is what we all want here.

It's a business that we can enjoy to run. We can be creative. Let's build the systems out that allow you to be creative. Creative. So before I get into the topic today, if you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian.