Earning $10k+ Per Month With A Productized Service (And Only 2 Hours Of Work) | With Brian Casel

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 169

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.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. I'm here with my big, bald, beautiful, red-shirted co-host, Christopher J. Graham. How are you doing today, Chris?

Christopher J. Graham (0:32)

It's more of a mauve color. It's somewhere in between purple and red. And, you know, I'm great, man. I'm great. I had a wonderful week since the last time we hung out, and me and my new dog Buster are hitting our rhythm, buddy.

Brian Hood (0:48)

Yeah, you changed your episode. You changed your camera angle from last episode, so now we don't get to stare at the dog the entire time, and I'm really mad about that, but it's fine. It's fine. He'll show up into the shot every now and again.

But yeah, this is my first episode back in the studio at home after the month-long workation to Europe.

I gotta say, man, it is so nice to be back here and settled in, back to my routine, and all that kind of fun stuff here. So let's move on to the episode we have in store today. Today's episode, I think, is gonna be a treat for a lot of people because most people that we talk to on this podcast, and especially with Chris and I's background, we are pretty much solo-operated businesses. We are freelancers through and through. We do the work ourselves. We might have an assistant, but most of the work, we're thinking, it's more like the employee mindset when it comes to running your business.

And today's guest, Brian Casel, has done something that not many people have done in what I would consider the freelance space or the services space. He has built, systemized, and now sold a business that does, forgive me if I'm wrong here, you do content writing or content creation as a service? Is that right, Brian?

Brian Casel (1:48)

Well, my company did do that. I'm still getting used to talking about it in the past tense here. Yeah, that was called Audience Ops. It was a productized service business, if you will. I owned it for almost seven years, like six and a half, seven years there. And yeah, it was basically content writing as a service.

We wrote the blogs for lots of different companies.

Brian Hood (2:08)

I can't wait to dive into this. See kind of like where he started with that, how he grew it to where he got it to, and how he actually exited it. But I just want to say something before we actually get to this interview.

Even if you have no aspirations whatsoever to sell off a business or to systemize and remove yourself from the business, which Brian did, and we'll get into that kind of story there where he really had it on a really good system where it was kind of like, it freed you up to work on other things like software, which we'll talk about as well. And so Chris and I both resonate with your story. But I want to say, like, even if you're not ready for this, even if that's not something that even vaguely interests you, keep listening to this episode. Because no matter where you are in your business, there is going to be something to take away because at the very least, there is something in your business that you hate doing that you need to get off your plate. And I think that Brian will be good at kind of explaining some of those things and how he hired and how he delegated and how he created things that made sure things got done on time at the quality that he expected every single time. And I think that's one of the major reasons that holds us back as freelancers from hiring in the first place.

Brian Casel (3:07)

Hey, right before we kick off, I just want to like say, because we were just talking offline before this. I know a lot of your listeners and you guys are, you know, music heads, music production.

Like I don't get to talk about that stuff on air very often with other people. So I'm just like looking at your backgrounds, like kind of take an inventory of your gear back there and stuff.

Christopher J. Graham (3:25)

So that Fender amps from 1966 I know you were wondering the answer to that question. How old is that?