How To Stop Trading Hours For Dollars By Creating An Ascension Ladder | With Rachel Brenke

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 214

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.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. And if this is your first time listening to us, we are a podcast all about monetizing your creative passions, mostly in freelancing. If you're not in freelancing, that's fine. Not just monetizing, but doing it in ethical ways, doing it in ways that we're not selling our soul, but also doing it in ways that we can profit and have a sustainable business. Because as freelancers, as creatives, I think one of the biggest reasons people struggle with this stuff is because they do not have the self-confidence to charge what they're worth. They cannot separate their creativity from their business senses. And my whole goal for you is to help you along with that journey. So today we have a wonderful guest on the show, and this conversation went a direction I was not expecting. Her name is Rachel Brenke. She's a lawyer, and we were bringing her on the show to actually talk law. We were going to talk about protecting yourself in legal entities and contracts and all the things that you might have questions about when it comes to legally protecting yourself.

And as I started researching into her, I quickly realized that that's not the conversation we're going to have. And we didn't have that conversation after I'm doing this post-interview.

We went a completely different direction. Rachel is an incredible entrepreneur, and she has built her business in a way that I think so many people in our audience should take away and model as much from her as you possibly can. We talk about everything from niching down because she serves a very specific subniche in the lawyer world. She actually serves creatives and freelancers, like us, which is why we had her on the show in the first place.

But also we talk about how she splits up her offerings. She calls it an ascension ladder. It's how she has pricing for Done With You, where it's like the higher price, higher ticket, where she's working directly with clients. The Done With You, where it's like a mid-tier pricing, where she's working alongside of them, but they're doing the work themselves. And she has Do It Yourself offerings as well, where she's created assets that she sells, and it gives her passive income. And we actually had this conversation before when we had Rachel Greenman on the show. I'll give you links to that later on in the interview. I link back to the episode that that specific conversation's on. But this is a wonderful business model that she's created for herself, and it directly translates to any freelance business out there. Whether you're a music producer, you're in photography, you're in videography, you're in graphic design. This would translate everywhere. And not only that, we talk about Rachel Brenke's content marketing machine. She gets all of her clients and customers from her content marketing engine that she's created, and she does all of this while also being a mother of five. She's the Renaissance woman, is the best way I can describe her. And she's very much like me, where she has ADHD, and she just has her hand in so many different directions. We talked about how she overcomes ADHD. We talked about how she makes decisions, how she chose her niche. And by the way, she has a seven-figure business. She's actually earned, at this point, close to or more than $10 million from all her businesses combined and all her revenue streams.

So if that doesn't convince you that there's something to take away from this woman, then I don't know what will. If that's not interesting to you and you don't want to know how an eight-figure business owner sets their businesses up, then go ahead and turn the podcast off now.

For the rest of you still here, this is absolutely gonna get a lot for you. And this is like a mini masterclass in entrepreneurship for freelancers. So enjoy this interview that I had with Rachel Brenke.

Rachel Brenke (3:15)

Thank you.

Brian Hood (3:20)

Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Rachel Brenke (3:22)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Brian Hood (3:24)

Yeah, so I originally got you on here because you're a lawyer, and I was like, hey, we need to have somebody on here to talk to us as freelancers about all the legal things we need to protect ourselves. And I was doing research on past interviews you've done, everything I do for all the guests I have on the show, looking at your website and all that. And I started outlining the question I want to ask you, and like, last on the list was legal conversations. And so like, because you're like a fascinating person, and you've built your law business in the way that I tell our audience to build their freelance businesses, their creative businesses, and as a service-based business, you are basically trading services in form of payment. There's not a big difference between you as a lawyer and every other freelancer listening to this podcast right now, and you're doing some really cool stuff. So I do want to get to the legal stuff, if we have time, if we get a chance, if not, we'll have to have you back on to talk about that stuff.