Booked Solid? Here’s What Comes Next for (Some) Serious Creatives

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 385
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. Most freelancers are working towards becoming booked solid. But for some of you out there, you are already booked solid, and you're wondering, what now? You're making solid money, but it might feel or start to feel like you're getting stuck in client work. And I know this is how I felt when I was booked solid months in advance, and I'm in this like endless treadmill of I just did this project, and now I got to do this next project, and oh my God, this project didn't finish, so now I've got to do it while I'm doing this other project. And it really starts to grate on you after a while, and it can feel like this thing that I've worked so hard for for so long is no longer a thing that brings me joy. So that's the dark side of freelancing, or I guess one of the dark sides of freelancing. So in this episode, I want to break down three of the tried and true methods to turn your freelance business into something more scalable. The goal being to detach your income from the hours that have worked. And that's one of the worst things about the freelancing business model in general, is if you don't work, you don't make money. You go on vacation, you're not making any money. You get sick, you're not making any money. You're in the hospital, you're not making any money. And so I want to give you three different options, and we'll go deep into the one that I think is probably the highest chance of success for most of the freelancers who are in that position where you are in high demand and you feel like you're trapped. I'm just saying what I'm going to say next so you know that I have been where you've been, and I've done enough to at least talk about these things, but I've made nearly $6 million of non-freelance income from other income streams outside of freelancing. Nearly $6 million. And I've also helped eight other freelancers make this shift, or eight recently. There are either six, multi-six, or in one case even seven figures that I've helped make this transition out of the day-to-day like doing work for clients into something more scalable through what I'm going to talk about today. And I'm not going to sugar coat any of this. Whether you stay as a freelancer or you feel like you've outgrown it, and you go to one of these other three paths that I'm going to talk about today, there are serious pros and cons, and you've got to be the one to make the decision of which one makes the most sense for you. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for serious creatives who want to earn more money without selling their souls. So if you feel like that might be you, you're in the part now where you're making great money, but you feel like you're selling your soul because it's not really what it was cracked up to be when it was just a hobby, maybe this is a good episode for you today. So the question to answer today is your book, Salad, what now? And I'm going to talk about three methods of growth when you've outgrown freelancing. And then again, the last one will be the one that I'm going to focus on for this episode because the three tried and true methods are things you've heard about before. I've actually talked about all of these in detail or relative detail back in episode 270, where I talked about graduating from freelancing. The title is actually the three best ways to graduate from simple freelancer to true entrepreneur with multiple income streams. That was over two years ago that I made that episode, but I talked through the models without really going into depth or talking about the pros and cons of each one. So I really want to get into this today. So the first one is the agency model. That's the first method. This is where you're book solid. What do you do now? Well, you can start hiring help, build a team, so you can do more of what you're already offering. So if you're a videographer, you have to videography services. There's actually one down the street for me, Cumberland Creative. They went that agency route where it's like one guy doing a lot of work in high demand, book solid. What does he do? Hires a team, gets a office right down the street from me, and builds an agency. And this is a tried and true method. There are plenty of agencies that are out there earning over 7 figures. And this is one of the pros, by the way. One of the pros of owning an agency or running an agency is it's one of the few ways a creative can make it to 7 figures. One of the few ways. There are other ways out there, but this is one of the few ways. And this is probably one of the most common ways. Another pro is having a team can be rewarding for some people like myself. I like having a team. I was always a person that was anti-team. I was out of an album, just going to be a solo preneur for the rest of my life. And something just randomly clicked in my head around early 2023, and I changed that. I have not gone back and I don't plan to go back, but it can be rewarding for some. Another pro is an agency is truly scalable, meaning you can get to not just seven figures, not just eight figures, you can get to nine figures. There are agencies out there that are doing over 100, over 300, over $500 million a year. I think 500 million. Don't quote me on that, but at least 2 to 300 million a year. Now, they're generally not creative agencies. Most are in the marketing space at that level, but there are some very large creative agencies that are out there. Let's talk about the cons now. This is the stuff that I didn't really talk about last episode from the one, two years ago, which again, if you want to listen to that episode, just go to sixfigurecreative.com/270.