How To Build Your Own Client Acquisition Machine (And Make 2025 Your Best Year Ever)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 323

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. 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 itky about yourself, but also without sitting around waiting for people to come to you, which is the theme and 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, and maybe you've been following 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 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 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 this show is, if this is your 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're 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 and 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 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 have 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. And part of being a business owner that we may not want to face as creatives is we have a responsibility for getting clients. Every business on earth has to figure this out. It's called marketing. And the mistake that so many creatives make is we rely on something called hope marketing. That is where we just sit, we hope, we pray, we're waiting for referrals to find us. And if that is working for you, great. This episode is not for you. If your calendar is booked solid, 100% full with your ideal clients, just from referrals, good for you. That's a place that many creatives can make their way to eventually as you've built your what I call word of mouth snowball to a large enough point where that's a self-sustaining thing. But in most cases, it's a long and arduous path, and you can speed that path up. For those of you who are just sitting around with different clients, if you take this into your hands instead of waiting around. And the key to making this whole strategy work, which it is a strategy, I'm going to talk about the five different parts of a client acquisition machine later on in this episode. But the key to making this work is you have to have full commitment. You can't dabble. You can't half ask this. We'll talk about dabbling in a second. You have to be fully committed because even one missing piece of your client acquisition machine, one thing that's wrong, that is a single point of failure. And a single point of failure is just if you took five different things, five different numbers and multiply five times five times five times five times zero, that one zero makes everything zero. So if you look at it from the equation like that, we have to have every single part of this and it has to be well optimized in order for this to work. And that takes full commitment. And it can't just be I work on the things that I want to work on, the things that I feel like I want to work on. Again, we have to take full responsibility as business owners and make this stuff work and build this stuff out and take initiative with this. And I want this episode to be the thing that helps you step closer to that. Now, for those of you who have listened to this podcast for a while, I do want to point out one other kind of pitfall or mistake that you have likely made as you've heard some of these episodes that we've talked about this thing at great length. You're the dabbler. And I'm calling some of you out, like personally, you're dabbling right now. And what I mean is like you listen to an episode, right? This is the pitfall of what we call the advice buffet. Every single episode, we're generally deep diving into a specific topic, like one narrow area. And so you think, okay, that's the thing I'm missing. And so you say, I'm going to go do that thing. You either, hey, maybe you go all in, maybe you're motivated right now and you want to build that thing. But then you lose focus on that thing and you just kind of let it wither away and die. Or you start to focus on that one shiny object and then you hear another episode the next week and you start to focus on that shiny object. And so now you have three or four irons in the fire and you're dabbling in all these different areas. Social media is a good example. A lot of people that I take on as a coaching client, when we start deep diving and doing an audit of business, we look at their social media. I say, we, it's me. I look at their social media accounts and I start to put together, what is their strategy in the past? What are they doing right now? What has worked? What has not worked? And most of the time, this is like probably 8 out of 10 times, they come to me and they're struggling to find clients. And we look at the social media. This is just one example. Social media doesn't have to be the strategy you take. I'm just using this as an example. They went through a period where they were consistently posting on social media and they were getting pretty good results. And then they start fading off and getting to the point where they have little fits and spurts of motivation. And that's what I call the dabbler approach to client acquisition or that one piece. And so the more you start dabbling in all these different areas and not having any sort of focus or strategy behind what you're doing, the less effective all of these things can be. So if you're experiencing a lack of consistency with the types of clients you're working with, maybe you were doing a lot of bill paying work or your lack of consistency in your month to month income, and you're ready to maybe admit to yourself that, hey, you are a business owner or I am a business owner. I have to take responsibility for this. I have to do things that maybe I don't want to do, but I need to do as a business owner, as something that's better for my future, better for my family, better for my business.