How To Stop The "Feast Or Famine Cycle"

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 312

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.

So I just got back from Alex Hormozi's event in Vegas at their acquisition.com headquarters. They have this two-day workshop, and they get a bunch of other business owners together and do this in-person workshop where we get to spend two days with Alex and Leila and their whole acquisition.com leadership team to fix our businesses basically, or learn and address the issues we have in our businesses. I want to talk about some of the stuff I learned from that today, but if you ever get a chance to go to this, I highly recommend it. You get to essentially spend two full days surrounded by people that are like, almost everyone in the room is smarter than you.

The lowest earning business I saw there was earning a quarter million dollars a year, and it was an 18 year old who's running a landscaping business, which is amazing to me. An 18 year old with a quarter million dollar a year of business with a whole team behind him. I was talking to him and just enthralled by listening to this story because at 18, I don't know about you guys listening to this show, but at 18, I was not running a quarter million dollar a year business. I can promise you that. And then the highest earner, besides the people in acquisition.com, was making 10, 15 million dollars a year. So being surrounded by these sorts of people is so invigorating for me as a business owner, as somebody who's been in the game for a long time.

The Hormozis and the entire leadership team harped on one big thing over the two days. And that was this, finding bottlenecks in your business and fixing the root cause of those bottlenecks. Now, if you listen back to episode 308, where I talked about how to give yourself a raise in four steps, I talked about something called the theory of constraints.

This is what I learned from Hormozis just through following them on the internet and reading their books over the years. But it's one thing to spot and start to address bottleneck. It's a completely other thing to actually fix the underlying root cause that's holding you back in your business. And that's ultimately why most of the freelancers I know go through these big feast or famine cycles because they never fix the root cause.

Even if you are trying to address the issue that's causing the feast or famine cycle in your business, if it's not the root cause, it doesn't really fix anything. So whether you're fixing a surface level issue or you are just doing the spaghetti approach where you get desperate because you're in this famine period for months and you're trying to get out of it and you're just trying anything under the sun to make it work, neither one of those approaches fixes anything because inevitably what happens is whenever you find your way out of the famine period back into a feast period, you give up on trying to fix whatever problem was there because life gets busy, you have excuses.

And so you're just right back there again in a few months. So I wanna talk today about fixing the root cause of the feast or famine cycle for what I've seen 95% of freelancers struggle with. And this is a direct thing that I learned from Hormozi himself, live in the flesh last week in Vegas.

And if you can follow what I talk about in this episode, what I learned from the man himself, Hormozi, then this is going to address the root cause of feast or famine cycle for 95% of freelancers. And once you solve this issue, business actually gets fun. In my opinion, you start this positive feedback loop where you realize that you can spot a problem in your business, you can take steps to address the root cause, you can fix the issue, and then you get to reap the rewards of fixing that issue. And that causes this spiral upwards, this positive feedback loop where now, what else can I fix in my business? This is actually fun now. Again, going back to Alex Hormozi's podcast, it's called The Game because the game of business is perpetual, it's never ending, it's the infinite game. And when you look at it like a game, something that's fun, something that has levels involved with it, something that has problems we have to overcome and consequences if we don't overcome those problems and rewards if we do overcome those problems, when you realize it is sort of a game, at least parts of it, it allows you to take control. It's a very powerful thing. Take control of your business and actually make positive change. Instead of being the victim who just kind of gets dragged along with whatever micro or macroeconomics are happening or whatever excuse in your life that's holding you back from having your business and having it the way you want it to be and addressing either root cause issues because it's someone else's fault or some external thing that you don't have control over. That sounds miserable to me. That sounds powerless.