How to Build a Portfolio That Attracts High-Paying Clients

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 387
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. Everybody wants higher quality clients, but does your portfolio actually back that up, or is your portfolio actively pushing those higher quality clients away? In this episode, I want to walk you through how to actually upgrade your portfolio so that you're attractive to your audio clients instead of repelling to your ideal clients. This is the number one reason you're unable to attract the clients that you want right now, because they look at your current work, your current portfolio, and they think, man, not for me, so we need to fix that. And if you make it to the end of this episode, I'll also give you what I think is like the secret that most portfolios are missing, and it's the easiest way to make everything look better than it actually might be. It's kind of like the cheat code, but that's towards the end of the episode. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, and this podcast is for creative freelancers who, A, take their businesses seriously, but B, they want to make more money without selling their souls. You got into this because you're probably passion first, but it takes more than passion, unfortunately. And there are 386 other episodes to help you with a lot of different things, but the portfolio is the topic for today because, again, we all want higher quality clients, but if you have an underwhelming portfolio or a portfolio that might even be detracting, actively detracting from you getting clients, that's going to continue to hold you back, and it's going to be essentially like you're racing at a full sprint up a 20% incline. I don't know if that can be done. 20% is a lot. You're going to be tempting to sprint uphill at 20% incline, and that's brutal, but it builds for a good butt. Get those glutes. All right, let's talk about this. So first thing I want to talk about before we even get into the specifics of building a portfolio is just to think through, step back for a second and think, what sort of projects do you actually want? A lot of freelancers are so genuinely so desperate, they will take anything, and when you are trying to take anything, there's no focus. You're essentially trying to boil the ocean. So if you can't be honest with yourself about what sort of work you want to be known for, if you can't plant a flag in the ground first and foremost and say, I want to be known for this, then this is not really going to matter. You can try to have great portfolio pieces, but you're just not going to be someone who's amazing at all the potential things in the world that are out there. You're just not going to be attractive to everybody. So the second you realize that you're not going to be attractive to everybody, but you could be wildly attractive to the right person, that's where a portfolio should start. Now we have other episodes on niching down and trying to find a blue ocean instead of a red ocean, and I encourage you to go check those episodes out. One of those is episode 339, how freelancers can win without competing on price. It's the blue ocean trio. I think it starts at episode 339, so just go to sixfigurecreative.com/339.
Or you can even go way back to episode 209, where I interviewed Michael Woods. The episode was called, Choosing a Niche That Attracts Your Best Clients and Repels the Worst. Those are kind of two to maybe go before you really worry about the portfolio. If you can't solidify or focus on something specific, maybe start there. But if you know what sort of work you want to be known for, which is a lot of people that listen to this podcast, if you've been listening for any number of months or years or just binge a lot of episodes recently, you probably have a good idea of the stuff you want to be known for. The next step is kill anything on your portfolio that doesn't align with that. It's like, I've planted my flag in the ground, but I really want to hold on to these other areas because I might get a project over there. The more you try to be known for other things outside of your one thing that you're known for, the more you try to be known for those other things, the less you'll be known for anything. So go back to episode 364 The title of the podcast is called Your Portfolio Looks Like a Cheesecake Factory Menu and It's Embarrassing. Kind of the subtitle is the portfolio paradox. The paradox is essentially this. The larger your portfolio, the more you think you're going to appeal to everybody like a cheesecake factory menu. But cheesecake factory is probably the only restaurant that can get away with having a menu that large and actually being able to fulfill on it and actually the food being pretty damn good, at least in my opinion, or the things that I've gotten there. Your portfolio should be smaller, focused, but incredible. It should be like you're going to a tasting menu, an eight course tasting menu at an amazing restaurant. They're not gonna have chicken nuggets in the back for you. I'm sorry, and that's okay. You don't want to be the chicken nugget guy or gal. So we've taken stock of our current portfolio. This is the area I want to focus on, and I've killed everything that's out of that. Now what do we do? This is where most people will be at this point. They'll have some portfolio left over, or you've even already built a pretty focused niche portfolio, but it's not to the level that you need it to be in order to level up your clientele. Now, I hate the generic phrase level up. If you ever use it in copywriting, please just remove yourself from writing copy ever again. AI's horrible at that. It'll use the word level up or next level all the time, and it's horrible AI copy. But there's some truth to right now, everyone's at a certain level, and to get to the next level, it requires a next step up in quality or portfolio. And if your skill set is there, but your clientele is not, your clientele could be holding you back. For example, you might have a level 10 skill set with a level five clientele, and if you put those two things together, it will not show off like a level 10 skill set. It will be like a very watered down level 10 It might be a level six or level seven skill set. You can make those level five clients look a little better. They look a little bit better, but they're not gonna look level 10 But that's what your skill set is. So everyone thinks you're level six or level seven. These are arbitrary numbers, arbitrary levels, but it gets the idea across. So how do we get the level 10 skill set and the level 10 portfolio pieces if we don't already have those? There are a few ways to go about this. I'm going to start with the easiest and we'll work our way to the hardest. But I need to reiterate, this is one of the most important things that you can do. Good luck ever getting paid ads to work. That's not even a prayer if you don't have a portfolio that's attractive to people. But you'll also struggle to get people in your immediate network who already know I can trust you to want to work with you if you're not the best fit for the skill set that you have. For example, if I know two graphic designers and I'm friends with both of them, but one graphic designer has a better portfolio than the other, I'm going to send on my friends or contacts to the better graphic designer, even if I like both of them equally. Hell, even if I like someone else more, I'm not going to expend my relational capital just because I like this person more. I'm not going to send my friends or my family or my colleagues to the inferior graphic designer knowing that I have someone else better that I can send them to. That's how most people are going to operate. They're going to send somebody to the best fit for them. And it may not be that each of those graphic designers have a better skill set than each other. It's just that one has a better clientele. Anyone who's been doing this for a while, you know that in order to make your skill set look as good as possible, you need to work with the best clients possible. This is just and true in web design, working with big brands who actually have the resources and the products to sell and the services to sell that are worth selling. Or in my background, music production, the bands and the artists who are the best musicians, who write the best songs. The better band is going to make my skill set look infinitely better than the inferior little local band who barely has two pennies of scratch together. Those people, and I said pennies there, in case you misheard me, those people are going to struggle immensely to make me look good. And if all I ever work with is those little small local bands or the little small mom and pop shops who have terrible products, terrible services, who don't really care or value your skill set, if that's all you're working with, that's all you're going to attract. That's all they're going to refer to you. That's all you'll ever be known for. So how do we break out of that? How do we get to that next tier, that next level? How do we get up the ladder, the staircase, whatever analogy you want to use here? We've got to force it to happen. There's a couple ways around this. The easiest to start, if you have the skill set, is to just build out your own portfolio. This works well in many freelance niches since you usually have some sort of skill set to build from scratch. So obviously if you're a web designer, you can build whatever website you want. Or if you don't have the skill set, maybe you're a music producer, for example, and you don't have all the skills required to play all the instruments and be the great vocalist and have the great songs. You don't have all those skills. That's where we find ideal clients and do the work for free. Okay, a spec work. Now this next thing I'm going to say is something I've been saying since, at least for the past decade. It's the brutally honest truth. But if you can't get somebody of the level that you want to work with, so whatever level you're at, let's just say you're level five and you're trying to get level seven, right? If you can't get the level seven people to work with you for free, then you are nowhere close to being ready for paid gigs at that level.