How To Give Yourself A Raise In 2026 (In 4 Steps)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 389

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. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through how to give yourself a raise as a freelancer, because freelancing is nothing like having a day job. In a day job, if you want a raise, you have to suck up to your boss, do a great job at work. I don't really know what you do to get a raise, because the last time I got a raise was when I worked at GameStop for two years, and I went from $5.15 an hour up to $5.50 an hour. So a whole 35 cent raise, something like that. So I don't really know what you're supposed to do to get a raise as a career man, but I am sure that's how you do it. Suck up, do a good job, do your annual review, and then hope that you get that 3% to 5% bump in your pay.

Or maybe, maybe you get a promotion to that next level up in your career ladder. In broad strokes, that's what it's like to get a raise in a day job. You just do your best work, you hope they give you a raise, and you have no direct control over whether or not you get a raise or not. It's literally up to your boss or your boss's boss. Freelancing, however, freelancing is amazing because you actually get to reap the benefits of doing a good job. You have direct control over what you were paid, and so if you have an amazing performance and you do a great job at executing all the things you need to execute as a freelancer, then you can get amazing pay. On the flip side, we can also just coast, like many people do at their day jobs, and then you start to see your incomes stagnate or go down. So the caveat obviously as a freelancer is, if you want to give ourselves a raise, we can at any point, as long as we know how to. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through a whole framework that is not from iBrain, it's from people way smarter than me, on how you can give yourself a raise, how to actually figure out what you need to do. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, first of all, welcome. Hi, hey, hello. Glad to have you here. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer, you offer creative services, and you want to make more money without selling your soul, and maybe you want to give yourself a raise today. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. From our returning listeners, you've probably heard bits and pieces of what I'm about to talk about today, but I want to bring it all into one nice, neat package in one episode for you, because we're going to be talking about the least sexy sounding thing on earth, but it gives you the sexiest thing on earth, which is a raise. So let's see if we can stomach the unsexy so that we can get the sexy, and that's business in a nutshell. It's doing a whole bunch of stuff, some of which we like to do, some of which we don't like to do, but we all have to do it, because when we sign up for freelancing, we sign up for a whole bunch of stuff, whether we like it or not. And the sooner we can admit that to ourselves, the sooner we're going to have a stable, reliable, profitable business. And it doesn't mean you have to sell your soul, it just means you have to do stuff you don't like to do sometimes. So that thing I'm going to talk about today is something called the Theory of Constraints. I first learned about the Theory of Constraints from Alex Shimozi, love him or hate him. He's a smart guy, he knows how to build businesses. And I think he's learned about it through multiple sources, like many of us have. I think he turned me on to a book called The Goal, a Process of Ongoing Improvement. And it is the worst book cover you'll ever see. We'll put the link in the show notes. And if you see this ugly book cover, it just says, the best-selling business novel that introduced the Theory of Constraints and changed how America does business. Over 10 million copies sold. The Theory of Constraints was first created for manufacturing businesses, as far as I know. But we are not manufacturing businesses, we are freelancers. So I want to dumb this down as best as I can, because I didn't fully follow all the things in that book and it ultimately doesn't matter because the Theory of Constraints, if you just boil it down to simple freelance terms, is to say, your income is capped by one limiting constraint at a time. If you flip that phrase around or that terminology around, it also means that if you can identify and relieve that one bottleneck, that one constraint in your business, you can see a pay bump in your freelance income. And that's what we're going to talk about today is how do we identify this? How do we actually fix these things? And the best part about this, in my opinion, is that as freelancers, we have very limited resources and time and energy and money to fix things in our business. And so, when we see the millions of things we could fix in our business, which will never be a small list, it will always be this massive list of all the things we know we're supposed to do. We've got to do socials, got to run paid ads. If you're going to do paid ads, you're going to do a new website, you got to get funnels up, maybe a lead magnet, maybe you're going to do a website revamp, maybe you're going to do cold outreach, warm outreach, pricing revamps, packaging revamps. I'm going to launch a recurring revenue thing. The sky's the limit. There's a million things we could do at any given time. However, with a theory of constraints, only one thing matters. And that, to me, brings simplicity. And simplicity is something we all need as freelancers because we can get quickly overwhelmed with this long list of things that you hear from other people, including this podcast. And instead, it focuses on this one thing, this one constraint in our business that, if alleviated, will raise our income. Now, there can be a whole lot of different constraints in your business. And I want you to just think through in your business, which one of these constraints do you think is the thing that's literally holding back your income right now? What's this one thing that if we were to fix this one constraint, you're able to actually increase your income, aka give yourself a raise this year. This first constraint is for my high earners. You are making over six figures. You're usually booked solid. That first constraint you're going to have to find a way to fix if you want to get your income up is time. When we are successful, when all cylinders are running, time will always be the limiting factor in every freelance business, because typically we're the ones doing all things. We are the ones having the sales conversations. We're the one generating the leads. We're the ones fulfilling all the work. We're the ones communicating with clients. And you can quickly see that even a quote unquote perfectly run freelance business, which doesn't exist, that has all things lined up well for clients to go through a wonderful marketing journey, a wonderful sales journey, a wonderful onboarding journey, a wonderful fulfillment journey, and a wonderful follow up to get them back working with you again or retaining on your roster if it's a recurring revenue. All these things can be running well, but eventually you will run out of time as a freelancer. So that is one of the major bottlenecks that freelancers will run into. And we actually have a whole episode on this.