How To Build Your Own Client Acquisition Machine (And Make 2023 Your Best Year Ever)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 225

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 an 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.

Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining us on the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much for giving the show a chance. Typically, we're talking all about how to make more from your creative skills so that you can earn a full-time living without selling your soul, without being stuck in a day job, without feeling itchy about yourself, but also without sitting around waiting for people to come to you, which is a theme in the topic for today's show, and it's something we've been talking about a lot lately.

If you are a returning listener, thank you so much for giving this show your repeated attention. It means a lot to me, and I'm excited for what we're going to be talking about on the show today. Quick update, I'm still traveling right now. For those of you who've been following along my travels, maybe you've been following me on Instagram. Me and my wife have been traveling for the fall. We've been saying we were in Bali for about a month. About a week and a half ago, we traveled to Thailand. We're in an island called Koh Samui right now. If you've been following me on my Instagram stories, you might have seen some of the views we've seen or some of the beaches we've seen here. Right now, we're staying in a resort. And this is one of the fun things about traveling in Southeast Asia is you get to find some really good deals. So we're at a five-star resort right now. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see kind of the background of what the room looks like. It's a nice room, but really as amazing as the view that I'm looking at right now, which I wish I could turn the camera around, it wouldn't show correctly.

But it's like we're on the hilltop, like on a mountain overlooking the bay with some islands in the far distance. It's like a completely, it's a very gorgeous view. But the big thing is this whole thing, we stayed here for a week. It's 55 bucks a night. It is an insane deal. And you just can't find like deals like that anywhere else, really in the world that I've found. We love Southeast Asia. We love traveling here. And that's one of the reasons the show is, if you're the first time joining us today, this is a little different type of show than normal, because typically I have a co-host or I have a guest on here. We're trying to get some insight from someone outside of, maybe, the world that you are in, whatever niche you're part of, whether you're in photo or video or design or illustration or music production. We have a lot of different listeners, a lot of different backgrounds, and we love to learn from each other, because we're trying to avoid being just another copycat business. Someone that's doing exactly what all the people in our surroundings are doing. And I say tongue in cheek, and I can say this because I'm from Alabama. We want to avoid being an inbred business, where all we're doing is learning from businesses in our immediate vicinity, our local area or people just like us in our niche. We don't want to be like that. That's not what works in 2022, 2023 and beyond. And part of what I'm going to talk about today is things that I've learned and I've picked up over the years, building multiple businesses in multiple different niches and coaching different businesses in different niches through how to build a client acquisition machine. So if you are right now sitting around wishing you had more people on your calendar, wishing you had more clients, this episode is absolutely for you because we're going to talk about how to build what I call a client acquisition machine. This is the key to having consistency in your business, having repeatability in your business, and frankly, getting what I call higher level clients. Like so many of us, we settle, even if we have clients coming in the door, even if we are making money right now, even if we're maybe happy with what we're earning right now as creatives, we may not be fulfilled with the types of clients that we're working with. So part of a client acquisition machine, part of one that is working really well for us is one that's bringing in higher tier clients so we're not just taking on what I call bill paying work. There's no shame in taking on bill paying work, but it's not something that we need to be doing for the rest of our lives because it's not really creatively fulfilling. So this is something that I've talked about quite a bit in the last, I'd say, two or three months on the podcast. We've had an entire client acquisition series. We've had guests on the show who've talked about different elements of this. I really encourage you, if you're new to this podcast, go back, listen to the backlog, and listen to some of the shows. You can choose based on titles what you think you might need right now. But this episode, I want to talk about the big picture, how to build that client acquisition machine. Because there's so many mistakes that I see people making as they're trying to, or at least attempting to do this, or refusing to do this. First being, and this is probably the most common, is as creatives, we tend to have an allergy towards anything to do with marketing, or putting ourselves out there. I'm doing air quotes right now if you can't see me, if you're not watching the video, you're listening to the podcast right now. For those of us who chose this as our career, as something that we're going to make a living from, it is our responsibility to learn these skills that are outside of just the creative realm, which is the reason I launched this show. And if you look at my normal podcast background behind me, I usually have a sign on the wall that says, it takes more than passion, because that is the driving force behind everything I do on this show, is to teach you those skills that you're maybe not passionate about, but you have to learn. Because the day you decided to take money as a freelancer or as a creative for the art you're creating, for the skills you develop as a creative, the minute you decided to take money, you have established yourself as a business owner.