Designing A Service That Scales | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 357

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. For any freelancers out there that are trying to break through that multi-6-figure income level, and you've been stuck, maybe at high 5 figures, low 6 figures, you know, 100, 125, $150,000 a year, those people, I've rarely seen the thing holding them back actually be marketing issues. If anything, you actually have too many clients and not enough time at that level. And normally, when you have too many clients and not enough time, the easy fix that I tell people to do is just raise your rates. In many cases, that will decrease the amount of clients that you have, giving you more time back, but the rate increase offsets that, so you end up making roughly the same amount of money, but working less time. So you can then take on more clients, and you'll hit some other kind of max at your business. The problem with that is, at a certain level, that stops working. Every single niche, every single industry, has an upper limit that you can charge in your niche before people just say no. And at a certain point, when your rates get too high, the more people you quote high rates to, the more people say no, you're gonna start eventually having no clients and lower income, which is not obviously what we wanna do if we're trying to break through the multiple six-figure income plateau. So if marketing's not the issue, holding you back from multi-six figures, and just raising your rates isn't the answer, what's the thing holding you back? It's generally from the people that I've worked with, the people that I've seen, and the people that I've consulted, it is generally issues around the offer itself. Most freelancers at this level, they're good at what they do. You don't make it to six figures without being good at what you do. You're usually great at what you do. You're usually a pretty good people person. The personality issues aren't there, generally at that level. It's not just straight up pricing issues, like I said, but it's usually some sort of offer issue that's holding you back. So when I say offer issue, I'm talking about how most freelancers are stuck in these custom projects. Every single project is this unique, bespoke, custom thing, because as creatives, we got to this because we're uber creative people. We love creativity. We love to just reinvent the wheel every time we work on a project. And while that's great to fulfill us creatively, it puts a real limit on what we can earn. And if you ever are trying to break through that plateau that you're stuck at because you have no time and you have tons of clients, but you can't break through the income plateau, the only real solution is to work on your offer strategy. When every single proposal that you do is this custom, bespoke proposal, that turns into chaos. You're quoting from scratch every single time. It takes too much time to quote. You end up pricing based on how long it's going to take or what feels fair versus having a strategic approach to pricing that's going to first give you a good cash flow and good revenue. And so you're stuck on this consistent delivery treadmill because custom projects usually turn into chaos at some point. Even if it's not chaos, it's still something that's hard to rein in and scale because every single thing looks different. There's no uniformity between what you're doing from project to project. You're also limited on how high your rates can go because there is no value framework around what value you provide. So your pricing is just hard to gauge on what the upper limit could or should be because you're not really solving a clear problem to a clear avatar over and over again on repeat. Or you're just stuck in a niche where there's no upper pricing room, where you can't raise your rates anymore. Your marketing ends up being confusing, this jumbled mess, because you're trying to do sometimes a lot of different services for a lot of different clients. So it's not really clear what problem you're actually solving. At the end of the day, you're not known for anything because you're known for everything. And the bottom line is you're just stuck in this reactive mode. You're reacting to the chaos of being successful. Six Figures as a freelancer is successful no matter what anyone says. And you can listen to Alex Chimozzi's in the world. To build your business to $100 million a year, you can feel like a failure. But if you make it to Six Figures, I call that a success. You are good at what you do. But at that level becomes that first level of chaos. You're just reacting to everything. And I understand it because I've been there. I've come from experience with this. But the way to get out of that is through intentionality. Having an intentional approach to everything that you do. So instead, I'm going to propose that you build out what I would just call a flagship offer. We'll talk about what the definition of that is how to do it in this episode. But just think through a flagship offer and putting my flag in the ground and saying, this is the thing I'm known for. This is the thing I'm going to build everything around in my business. And if you can do that, the people who have done that the best are the ones that I have seen go to multiple 6 figures, half a million, 750,000, even as a solo friend, I've seen one or two go to 7 figures, which is crazy to think about. Because a well thought out flagship offer allows you to separate your time from your services. So the money you're earning is not directly associated with how much time you're spending on it. You can build systems around all the projects you're working on versus everything feeling like chaos. And with all this, you can create crystal clear messaging that makes it easy for people to say yes to you because it's clear what you're going to do for them. And ultimately keep delivery, aka your time from being the bottleneck. Time is usually the bottleneck that's holding you about for multi 6 figures. So if we can eliminate that bottleneck, then we can go back to marketing as the issue we got to solve for most clients. If this is your first time ever listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube for whatever reason you're watching, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. We take a lot of influence from a lot of different industries, a lot of different people, and bring it into the podcast so that we are learning from what other people are doing versus just staying in our own little tight knit circles and only looking over to our left and to our right just to see what our immediate neighbors are doing, which is a horrible way to run your business. You want outside influence. That is the way to run your business. If that sounds good, this is the place for you. Coming back to your flagship offer, let's first talk about a checklist. Think about like a diagnostic list. You're doing like a diagnostic on your health or your car or your home or whatever, and you're trying to figure out first, what are the things that are missing? What have I not done maintenance-wise in my car? I don't know. What do I need to do with my health here? Think about like a health check. What are all these should-be's or should-haves when it comes to a flagship offer? And then whenever you feel yourself missing one of these things, we'll talk through in this episode kind of how to fill that gap or how to fix that. So let me define an offer. Offer is just what service or services, what outcome, what thing you're offering people. In most cases, you think of them as services. We'll talk about the difference between the two, like a true offer versus just a service you're offering, but it's just what are you offering for money, right? This is like a checklist here. Your offer should be first, outcome-based, not service-based. I just kind of alluded to that. The way most freelancers mess this up is, I sell a service. I offer editing services. I offer production services. I offer design services. I offer X, Y, and Z services. While you can get to six figures selling services, seen it, done it, understand it, it is not the best way to do it, generally. The opposite is owning a problem. When you think through the problem that you are solving people, and you own that problem, and you end up creating a better service at the end of the day, a better package, a better offer. And I've talked about this way, way back in hundreds of episodes ago in the podcast. I think Kodiak was the example we used on a show where we talked about solving a problem versus offering a solution. Kodiak is probably now bankrupt. I don't know what they're doing. Somebody can fact check me here. They're not doing well, but they're originally a film company. So they offered film. That was their quote service. That was the thing they offered. They were a solution-based business. They offered film. And so if you had a camera back before there was digital photography, you would use Kodiak film in almost all cases. I'm old enough to lightly remember having actual film cameras in my very young childhood. And I do remember owning and buying Kodiak film, right? The problem was they weren't problem-focused. The problem was I'm trying to capture these memories, right? Trying to capture these memories so that I can share them with friends, with family, remember them, look back with nostalgia on those things. And when you think about the problem itself, film was one solution to that problem. It wasn't the best solution to the problem. Or it might have been the best solution for a while, but eventually digital photography came out. And again, someone can fact check me here, but I believe Kodiak or someone at Kodiak was the first person to invent the digital camera. And they essentially just brushed it off or swept it aside because they saw it as something that could upset their industry instead of embracing it. Blockbuster was the same way. You could say the exact same argument with Blockbuster versus Netflix. They were too focused on the solution. They had sunk cost bias behind all the infrastructure and money they'd put into offering this one solution versus just being focused on the problem itself, the problem they were trying to solve. And if you look at it now, digital photography has essentially destroyed Kodiak's business. Netflix has utterly destroyed Blockbuster, to the point where I believe the last Blockbuster in America is on Airbnb now. You can say at it as a fun little blast from the past. So when you own a problem, you are willing to pivot to something that's a better solution for people. Instead of offering this service, you offer that service, or you bundle a package of services together to better solve the problem for the client. And the more expensive the problem is that you're solving for your clients, the more you can charge. Hands down, bottom line, when it comes to pricing, when it comes to getting paid what you're worth, the more expensive, the more painful the problem for the client, the more you're going to get paid. I've talked about in the podcast before that how the closer your service is to the money, the more you can generally charge, because money is a very important thing in any business, if you're in B2B especially. So if you are doing motion graphics, for example, and you're creating graphics for product launches, that's something that's very close to the money. And that's why motion graphics designers can be paid 20, 30, $50,000 or more to do a product launch for people, because the other solution to that is product photography, which can be very expensive. If you have to make changes last minute on projects because of design changes or something, then you have to do another shoot, and that can be really expensive or put a product launch behind schedule. That stuff is a huge problem, especially when you have a team of people behind it and a whole marketing department. I mean, think through how big of a problem that can be. And when you can tie, again, you tie your motion graphics service to something that is that close to the money, the product launch, it's a very valuable thing. I will do the opposite of that now and talk about how something that's not a very expensive problem or something that's not very close to the money. And that's something from my background, which is music production. Music production is very much an aspirational thing. There is very rarely a financial incentive behind the music being recorded, unless if you're at the highest levels. If you are the one recording Taylor Swift's album, she's going to make a lot of money from that. You can probably make a lot of money from recording or producing her. But in most cases, when you're working with prosumer bands, like I would call my band, I used to be in a metal band, we were signed, we toured, we did the whole thing. But money was not our motive. We were just doing it because that was the thing we wanted to do. It was very passion driven. And because of that, we were very money conscious. We were very tight with our budgets when it came to recording. And in the grand scheme of things, that was not where we made our money anyways. We made our money on tour selling merchandise. So again, the more expensive the problem is to the client, the more you can charge. The closer you are to the money, the more you can usually charge, the more you can make. But also the fewer people who were actually able to solve the problem well, the more you can charge. That was one of the things that set me apart was I could solve the problem better than the next person. And I had a better set of skills for mixing and mastering the genre of music that I was in than most people could. I was more reticulous when it came to producing and recording and editing musicians. So I could solve the problem better than the next person, but there were still three or four or five people in the US my clients could go to to get a similar or a better result for the same or maybe slightly higher, maybe even slightly lower price. Now this goes obviously back to the Red Ocean versus the Blue Ocean strategy. We have a podcast episode on this, episode 339, how freelancers can win without competing on price. It was called the Blue Ocean Trio. So this is something you're struggling with. Go back to that episode. Just go to 6figurecreative.com/339 to get that episode. But let's zoom back out now. Again, we're in a checklist for your offer, and we're trying to diagnose one of the things that might be wrong with your current offer. First one was you own a problem. You don't just own a service. You're outcome focused. You're not solution focused. You are not Kodiak. You are the digital camera. You are not Blockbuster. You are Netflix. The second item on this offer diagnosis kind of checklist here is what you offer is clear. It's not fluffy. This is another problem I see time and time and time and time again. If you have to use fluffy cotton candy language to explain what it is that you do, how you help people, what you offer, what problem you solve. If you have to put a lot of flowery, fruity language in there to do that, you're at a disadvantage. Donald Miller is the one who I think made this quote famous, which is probably someone else's quote, but if you confuse, you lose. It is from the BookStory brand, which fun fact, Donald Miller, his office is right down the street from my house. I walk by it all the time. He drives a, I believe, a silver Porsche Cayenne for Ucar people. But one of the biggest struggles that we have with our clients when it comes to mapping out the offer and creating your messaging is getting people to just say in plain language what it is that you do, how you help people. If you have to butter it up with a bunch of like fluffy words, either you're not clear enough or you're not solving a big enough problem for it to be a standalone value in and of itself, right? Like for us, the thing that we help people with the most in our coaching program is we help you get clients.