12 Things You Can't Ignore If You Want to Thrive as a Freelancer

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 309

Welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

This episode is going to be a tough love episode. This is going to be Brian on a soapbox talking through how to build a thriving freelance business.

Just because you make money doesn't mean you're thriving. And if you are not making money as a freelancer, you're definitely not thriving. So there's a definite threshold where you can claim to be a thriving freelancer. It's when things are stable, you have margin in place, or buffer or financial runway in place, meaning that you could take a hit financially and you're not going to stress.

You don't have constant fires to put out as a freelancer, and you find fulfillment in what you do. Those are all signs that you're a thriving freelancer. And I would venture to guess that a lot of people that listen to or watch the show on YouTube, that does not really sound like their business. If it sounds like you're not thriving right now, then this episode is absolutely for you. If you're thriving, there's better episodes for you that are out there. And the reason I call this a tough love episode is because what I'm going to talk about today is something I see sabotaging freelancers again and again and again, from the clients that we coach to the people that email me in, the people I talk to day to day, have lunches with all the time. It's the same thing over and over and over and over again. And it really frustrates me because this thing that holds us back, this thing that keeps us from thriving, is the same thing that makes us such great creatives. It's that we let our emotions run our business. That is a toxic, horrible thing. And as freelancers, we need emotions, we need that emotion to drive our creativity, to push us forward. But when we let our emotions run our business, that's when so much just gets dropped. So many balls get dropped, so much stuff gets avoided. And you just let things fester for weeks, for months, sometimes for years, before you ever actually address it. And sometimes those festering wounds can infect your freelance business to the point where you die as a freelancer, aka have to go get a day job. While some, the day job might be the better move, honestly, I'm like, for some people, that is legitimately the better thing for you. For others, it is a death sentence. Like, I am utterly unemployable as a human being. So self-employment is literally the only option I have as a person on earth.

And just to give a concrete example here, I talk about client acquisition all the time on the podcast, because that's the area that a lot of freelancers struggle with. And it's an important part about having a thriving freelance business, it's not the entire point, but it's a huge point of it. And even within the big bucket of client acquisition, there is like lead generation. And that's just like one example of things that freelancers tend to avoid. They drop the ball. They don't have any consistency or systems or process or strategy behind. And so they let that just be a thing that is festering for weeks, for months, for years. And you go through these constant feast or famine cycles that eventually one of those famine cycles might last so long that it kills you. So today, I want to talk about all my little soapbox episode, my tough love episode. I want to talk about the things that you are avoiding right now. So you understand what you're avoiding. And then I want to talk about how you can stop avoiding those things. I want to give you a big mindset shift that is something that I've talked to my own clients about that I think is a really helpful way to approach this sort of stuff mentally. Those things that we avoid because we don't want an unhealthy freelance business. Nobody listens to the show. Nobody even who lets their entire business run purely off emotion. It's not because we want this out of our business. It's not because we want to be unhealthy. We all want the same thing. We want a thriving business that we love, that we enjoy, that has consistency, that has margin, that has safety.

But also some freedoms that a day job won't give you. And before I dive into the main topic of the show, I just want to say, if you're new to this podcast, this podcast is for you. If you are a freelancer who offers creative services and you want to make more money from those creative services without selling your soul, this episode is definitely for you. And this podcast is for you.