Building A Demand Engine That Takes You From $100k to $250k+ | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 358

Welcome to the 6 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. Trying to earn 6 figures as a freelancer is hard enough. Trying to get to multiple 6 figures a year as a freelancer is even harder, because as you get more and more booked up, you get more and more busy, and as you're more and more busy, you let a lot of things slide, kind of just let fires burn, essentially. And when you inevitably have that lull in your schedule that comes, you essentially just treat that as a much needed time off, much needed rest. So you either just take it easy and don't do anything during that time because you're kind of burnt out and you're trying to recover, or you end up using all of that time to put out all the fires that have been building up to that point. The problem is, those lulls in your schedule is what is holding you back from breaking 200k or 300k or 400k or whatever your multi-6 figure a year goal is. Those lulls in your schedule cannot happen, because those lulls in the schedule, aka gaps in your schedule between projects, are opportunity cost. All of those gaps in your schedule could be filled with paid projects to get you over that multiple 6 figure a year hump. On top of that, the lulls in your schedule, some that last too long or some that were unexpected or cancellations that came through, and now you're like desperate to get a project in there, those turn into you lowering your rates because you need to fill the lull in your schedule. Puts downward pressure on your pricing. Even high earning 6 figure freelancers are not immune to this. So breaking 6 figures is hard, don't get me wrong, but it's much easier than breaking into multi 6 figures because there's just so much leeway you get away with at 6 figures that you just don't get at multi 6 figures. So instead of letting these gaps happen, let's talk about building what we call a demand engine. A demand engine is something that's going to keep your inbox full of inquiries. It's going to keep your counter full of paid projects so that you can start to charge more because you have plenty of inquiries in the inbox. So you can just confidently raise your prices over time. And then you're not having these gaps in your schedule that are eating away at your revenue for the year. So that is going to be the topic of today's episode. Before I get into that, hi, I'm Brian Hood. You're listening to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. Either you're new here or you've never listened before. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more money from your skills without selling your soul. And we do that through lots of influences from lots of industries. For example, I've built 6 Figure Creative into a multi 7-figure-a-year business. My freelance career was a multiple 6-figure-a-year business and grossed well over 7 figures, maybe multiple 7 figures through the decade that I did that. I've also built 6-figure income streams in different areas like real estate, software, music, and now my team that I've built at this company. I have multiple team members who have built multiple 6-figure-a-year companies. So we have lots of influences from my background, my team, their background, the guests we bring on this podcast, their background. So if you like to have lots of perspectives from lots of different people, including the 200 plus freelancers and agencies that we coach for client acquisition, this is the right place to be for you. So let's get into the demand engine thing. There's something I want to talk about from Alex Hermosy, somebody I look up to, somebody I've followed a lot, love him or hate him. He knows this stuff when it comes to client acquisition. He talks about this thing called a theoretical max in a business.

The theoretical max is basically you can take two numbers. If he knows two numbers, he can tell you how large your business will be. This is what he did with me and my company when I was there back in August. And this is what I've heard him talk about with other companies he's consulted with, or people that are part of his portfolio. It's essentially you can take the number of new clients you get each month, the percentage of your clients that you're losing each month. You know those two numbers, and you can basically calculate how large your business will be before it starts to plateau. It's that theoretical max. It's essentially the equation that tells you where just about you'll bounce kind of between on your upper monthly income. Freelancers, this is pretty difficult if you don't have a recurring service where you can track what's called churn. If I have 10 clients and I lose one every month, that means I have a 10% churn rate. If you don't have a recurring service, it's very difficult to figure out what your churn rate is, but you still have it as a freelancer. Assuming you ever have clients come back to you. So in the audio world, music world, which is my background, music production, generally you'll have about between 50 and 70% of your clients will come back to you each year. And so if you know what percentage of clients come back to you every year, let's just say 50%, then we know you lose roughly 50% of your clients every year. And you can take that 50%, you can divide it by 12, and that gives you about a 4% churn rate each month, something like that. The reason to bring this up is because when you know there's two numbers, there's only really two ways to grow your business. You either bring in more clients each month, or you keep clients around longer, or keep clients coming back more. And in this episode, we're focusing on that first piece. How do we get more clients in the door? Now, obviously, the second part of the equation is just as important for you people that have a month of recurring service or a month of retainer or some sort of subscription freelance service that I've talked about a lot on this podcast. The longer you keep clients, the easier it is for your business to grow, obviously. However, it takes both sides. You can't just have 10 clients and just ride them till they die. You have to continuously bring in new clients every month or every few months, depending on how your business model is. And so we're going to focus on that first part today. The demand engine. How do we get more clients for you every single month? But 6 Figures, when you've earned 6 Figures as a freelancer, you're good at what you do. That's proven. You've proven that you're good at what you do or people wouldn't hire you. There's proven demand for what you do, which is not necessarily the case when you're a really low earning freelancer or somebody who's just getting started. You don't know if there's actually proven demand for the service or services that you offer. You know the business model works or at least works within reason. If that's not the case for you, if you just have a terrible business model and you're just barely eking out 6Figures, maybe you need to fix that before we worry about demand engine stuff. And number four, we know at this point you have an offer that scales generally. And what I mean by that is you could, in theory, take enough clients to get to at least 200K a year. If not, you don't have a scalable offer, meaning if your clients are worth 10 grand and you can only take on 10 projects a year, you don't have something scalable to multi 6Figures. So assuming all those things at 6Figures, you're set up to do a multi 6Figure business. Now we just need to fill your roster, fill all the slots on your calendar, fill you up so that you can actually break that threshold. That is where a demand engine kicks in. It is a repeatable process that brings in consistent, predictable leads and clients every single month. I've also called this a client acquisition machine or a client acquisition system. Call it whatever you want. I like demand engine for this purpose because it kind of puts demand into two different buckets. The first bucket is there's existing demand for your service out there right now. All we need to do is put your bucket under that stream of demand, just for a little mental metaphor. It's already there. Just put your bucket under there and capture it. So demand capture. The other bucket is demand creation. It is taking people that are perfect fits for your service and creating demand for your service. Maybe they didn't know they needed your service. Maybe they didn't even want your service. But you can say and do things that end up creating the demand out of thin air. A quick example for this in music production, again, my background, is whenever you have someone who is a musician and your music producer, if there's no song that exists, then there's no music to be produced.