How To Give Yourself A Raise This Year (In 4 Steps)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 308

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.

In this episode, I'm gonna 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 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's 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 gonna walk you through a whole framework that is not from my brain, 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 wanna make more money without selling your soul, and maybe you wanna give yourself a raise today. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. For my returning listeners, you've probably heard bits and pieces of what I'm about to talk about today, but I wanna bring it all into one nice, neat package in one episode for you, because we're gonna 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 a 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 gonna 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 gonna talk about today is something called the theory of constraints. I first learned about the theory of constraints from Alex Shamozzi, love him or hate him, he's a smart guy, he knows how to build businesses, and I think he's learned about 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.