My top 4 lessons from 2024

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 348

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 last year, 2024, this business more than doubled in size, after actually more than doubling in size in 2023 Just to share some numbers, we're currently on a multi-seven figure run rate right now. And I was able to do this last year without overworking or underworking. I continue to work my normal nine to five, Monday through Friday. I get up, go to the gym, do my normal routine, start work around nine o'clock, and I'm done before five o'clock usually. So I am working. I'm not underworking. This is not some lifestyle business, but I'm also not working myself to the bone. I got to take my mom out for the summer. We went to Europe because she retired in June. So July, we spent the entire month in Europe. That was something that like, it's a once in a lifetime thing, right? I wanted to treat her to a trip. She'd never been out of the country before. If you've been listening to the show, you heard me talk about that. And then we also shut the entire company down for the last two full weeks of this year to give the team some time off. I was also able to do this in 2024 without ruining the relationship with my wife. Like a lot of business owners have done. The divorce rate for entrepreneurs, my guess, I haven't looked at the status, is probably much higher than of nine to five-ers. Entrepreneurs are notorious for prioritizing their businesses over their relationships. So in my opinion right now, my wife and I are closer than we've ever been. You have to ask her opinion on this as well, but I think she'd say close to the same thing. And I love being with her. So that hasn't been sacrificed to grow the business. And I also didn't sell my soul. If you've heard me talk about this on the podcast before, I've said this podcast is for creatives who want to make more money without selling their souls. There's some variation of that I've said over the years. I love what I do here. I get to feel the impact that we have on our clients. I get to feel the impact I have on my team as we grow the team and I get to help develop the team and get them to where they want to go as people working for me. And ultimately, I was able to do this in 2024, and I'm going to share the four lessons here that I've learned throughout this last year. But I was able to do this because this is the healthiest, most fundamentally sound business I've ever had. I was in a band when I first started. That was technically a six-figure business from 2004 to 2008, an independent band. We eventually got signed and toured and did that thing as well. Then I started my studio that I did that for a decade, grew that to multiple six figures, grossing over seven figures throughout my freelancing career there. Two software companies, both of those over six figures. I've also done real estate, Airbnb. All of those things are great. None of them were bad businesses, but this one is the most fundamentally sound. And I probably should just do an episode breaking down all of the factors of why this is the most fundamentally sound episode. If you want that, just reach out to me. I'll put an outline together and do it maybe next week. That's ultimately why I'm able to do this. But I want to talk about the four big lessons I learned last year along the way. That's helped me not just double the business last year, but I will again double the business again this year. We're on track to do that. That's the goal. And I think these four lessons will be helpful for most, if not all of our listeners. So if this is the first time I've listened to the show, first of all, hello, I'm Brian Hood. I kind of talked about my history a little bit just there, so I'll skip all that. But this podcast, in a nutshell, is a way for me to take all I've learned from my experiences and my backgrounds and all the industries that I've been involved in, and learn from all of the clients that we're working with now and all the different freelance industries and all the other sources of information I learned from other influencers and other educators on how to run a good fundamentally sound business and bring that back to freelancers. If you feel like you're stagnated or you feel like your influences in your space don't really know how to run a business, this might be a good podcast for you. If you like just looking to your peers to the left and the right on how to run a good business, maybe this podcast isn't for you, but this is how we take diverse sources, diverse new information to be better creatives. Because just like if you're trying to design something or you're trying to produce music, my background is music production, if you just listen to the same thing all the time or just look at the same looking websites all the time as a web designer or just look at the same brands all the time, you're not going to innovate. Just like in your business, you're not going to innovate if you just look to other business owners just like you. So this podcast is my way of bringing a lot of different insights from a lot of different industries into this world. Because I don't know many people that talk about other industries and how they apply to freelancers. So let's talk about the four lessons here. So the first thing I want to talk about is, in my specific case, as we grow every year, I have to detach my time from what I make. And I think that's why a lot of freelancers are doing what they're doing is they maybe worked a day job, or they worked an hourly job, and they wanted to get away from trading dollars for hours, or hours for dollars, however you look at that. Many freelancers now are still trading hours for dollars, where you're just charging hourly or just charging daily. And maybe you want to get away from that. The only way to double your business, if you're directly tied to dollars for hours, is to double the amount of time you work. And at a certain point, that just utterly breaks down. Every freelancer who has been successful at what they do has likely hit that upper limit at least one month in their life where you couldn't possibly take on more work. And so you know what that upper cap is. So the only way to get away from that is to completely detach your time from what you make. And the lesson I've learned again and again, and last year I learned again, because I still hit this limit all the time, is that I am still doing things that I shouldn't be doing. So last year I had to learn the lesson many, many times. I've talked about it in the podcast before, but it's ruthlessly implementing the easy eights. We've talked about it on the show before. The easy eights are eliminate, automate, delegate, and mitigate. And I'll kind of walk through those and how I've done things in this business over the last year. We've had multiple episodes on this before. If you go way back to episode 216, how to spend less time doing the stuff you hate, is called the easy eights framework. But this is the gist of it here. All the things in my business that were not moving the needle that I was currently working on, or that honestly anyone was working on the business, if there was resources devoted to it, someone else's time, ad dollars, especially my time, ruthlessly eliminating that from the business. Just kill it. If it's not effective, or it's not bringing in the same level that something else might be bringing in, or not the same level of success as something else, just ruthlessly eliminating it, getting it out of there. Because there's no point in automating something that shouldn't be done. There's no point in delegating, handing off a task to another teammate, if it's something that shouldn't be done in the first place. So just looking at the business and finding all the areas that no one should be doing at all, and just eliminating those things. Next was just automating the things that were tedious, that I was doing, that could just have easily been done by some other system that can do automation, whether it's Zapier or marketing automation systems or project management systems. There's a lot of ways to automate different things. And one example was just as we started to grow and bring on more and more clients, in our biggest month, we brought on like 27 new clients. The process of onboarding all those clients can be very manual, very tedious at that level. If you're just bringing on a few a month, it's really easy to make that a very manual process. Here's the form you need when that's sent back. Here's the client agreement. Here's the calendar to book this thing. But as we grew, building out a very good, well thought out, well automated onboarding system that moved people through a visual pipeline where we can see where every single person is in the onboarding phase and have follow ups for anyone who's taking their sweet time to make sure they're not missing something or make sure they're not needing something from us or whatever. That was one of the big things that we fully automated last year. So it takes less brain power and time for me to manage and my team as well. The third part of Easy Eights and the thing that was the biggest meat for me last year and 2023 was delegating. So there are things that I should not be doing because there are people who are better at it than me. If you are an entrepreneur and you're like me where you're okay at everything, it's not hard to admit to yourself, right? There's a few things that I'm really good at that are hard to hand off, but I understand that most things I am not good at, right? So we brought on four new full-time people last year, and everybody that I brought on is better at the thing that they do than I am. And so this is a really tough thing for a lot of people to do because they look at it as money out the door. There's kind of two factors to look at. One is how much are you paying out? And then the other one is how much are you getting back? This is just basic investment, right? I'm investing X amount per month into a new employee. I'm getting multiples of that back from that employee in two different forms. One is maybe revenue that that specific person is generating or in forms of time that I'm getting back on my calendar or my schedule that I can put into other things that do generate revenue for the business. This is actually something that I have to relearn all the damn time, but the very first time I ever did this was 2014, maybe 2015, and this was as a freelancer, when I took all of the tedious setup work for my projects and handed it off to someone else, I paid them something like 30 bucks an hour to do the setup, which is a tough pill to swallow for anybody when you're paying someone else 30 bucks an hour. I probably couldn't have gotten it a lot cheaper, but it's just somebody that I trusted. I knew them. They'd worked for me before in the studio as an assistant, but they did all my prep work for my mixing projects, and then it saved me 80% of the time on the session, and I'm able to just open it up, do the big picture, strategic, creative stuff, and then I'm done with it. So instead of 10 hours, I spend two hours on it. So he didn't directly give me money, but he took down 80% of the work, and I'm trying to remember the exact math, I have a YouTube video on this, but the math was something like, I might get paid $600 to mix a song, I pay him out 240 of those dollars, I have $360 remaining, and I spend two hours, and that's 180 bucks an hour. It was actually probably a little more favorable than that, but at the end of the day, my time went from earning 60 bucks an hour to $120 an hour, something like that. I think it was closer to 300 an hour in the video that I did, but that's just one example of someone saving you time that turns into more money because I could take on more projects. This is really the most relevant when you've hit that ceiling of how much time you can spend on something. This is not for somebody who's barely scraping by right now. Delegation is for when you're a time poor, not money poor. Automation is for anyone, time poor, money poor, you can automate a lot of things very efficiently, very cheaply, without investing much money in it. And this is where we get to the fourth thing in the EZ8, and that is mitigate. There are things that I have to do. I have to do this podcast. I can't right now hire someone else to do this. We'll see how that goes in the future. I have thoughts. But there are things that I have to do, like this podcast. I don't have a teammate doing this. I don't have somebody I've hired on to do this. And I can't automate it. I can't just eliminate it because it's very effective for our business, a big part of this business. But I can mitigate it, meaning I can make this suck less for myself. I can remove all amounts of friction. And so I've done crazy things like I have the Amazon device, which I'm not going to say the name of right now, because it might turn on right now and start listening to me. But I have a thing where I might say, hey, girl, turn on my studio lights. It turns all the lights on in the room. I have all my microphone settings on a preset. I have my camera. I can just turn it on in one press. Oh, and I also have something called Alfred set up too, with one command opens up all the windows I need for the podcast. So really, in about 30 seconds to a minute, I have everything open and ready to go, including all programs, all tabs, everything ready to go to do the show. To counter that, before, I would have to make sure the lighting is good. I didn't have professional lights. I have to make sure the window was open a certain way. And if the lighting was bad, I have to adjust the camera aperture or brightness settings. And then I have to make sure the mic sounds good, make sure I look good on camera. I have to make sure that I pull all the programs up and all the tabs that I need, et cetera, et cetera. I also have a checklist I go through for the podcast. So I don't have to use my brain power before doing the show. That's an example of mitigating. You're using systems, processes, kind of sort of automations, actually, if you think about it, to make this thing suck less so that I'm able to do it consistently every week without giving up. And there are dozens of little things like this in my business and in my life that I've had to do this on, because I can't eliminate, I can't automate, I can't delegate it. The only way to do is to mitigate the amount of suckiness involved in doing something. And don't get me wrong, I love doing this show, but set up sucks. I don't want to have to do this crazy manual set up process every time. So is the first big lesson. The first big thing that allowed us to double last year and again double this year is ruthlessly doing this all the time. There will be more things that I have to take myself out of. We have to automate to a better degree.