Pricing Strategies From The CEO Of A Billion-Dollar Business | With Mike McDerment

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 165

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.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, coming at you from Valencia, Spain, on my little work-cation right now. I'm here with my big, bald, beautiful Chris Graham co-host. Chris Graham, I just messed that up. How you doing today, Chris?

Chris Graham (0:36)

I am having a fantastic day.

Brian Hood (0:38)

And we're also with another bald and beautiful friend here, Mr. Mike McDerment, the CEO of FreshBooks. We have an incredible interview lined up for you here. I already know ahead of time. We haven't done this interview yet, but I already know this is going to be incredible because this is somebody we've been looking to have on the podcast for a while. We actually had an episode, a couple episodes about a book you wrote a while back called Breaking the Time Barrier. And I know we're going to get in all that stuff. So anyway, say hi, Mike.

Mike McDerment (1:02)

Hi, Mike. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian and Chris.

Brian Hood (1:06)

Okay.

Hi, Mike thing. Oh my gosh.

Chris Graham (1:09)

We're pumped, man. Like Brian mentioned, we've talked about Breaking the Time Barrier again and again and again. And Brian and I are both sort of business book nerds.

And so we've read a lot of business books. And I think previously in the podcast, I think at one point we both agreed like, Breaking the Time Barrier is one of the best business books of all time. And it's a free PDF that you can download right now and read in 45 minutes.

Brian Hood (1:31)

45 minutes, yeah.

So the episodes that we actually did that on is episodes 84 and 85 of the podcast. Go back and re-listen to those where Chris and I really kind of go play by play. We break down. It's almost like a book study or like a, yeah, with just Chris and I. So go re-read if you did already, go read Breaking the Time Barrier, go listen to those episodes. But we have Mike here because we want to talk about some of these concepts from the man himself, the person who wrote this book and the person who, I want to say, implemented those things better than anyone and then stair-stepped. We actually had an episode last week, if you listen to Austin Hull's interview, how he stair-stepped from freelance income to passive income. Mike has also done that because he used his freelance business to fund FreshBooks, which is now, how large is FreshBooks now, Mike?

Mike McDerment (2:10)

We're a little over 500 people now, but 20 million people have used the service since we got it. And if you check the news, we just became one of those funny looking horses with a horn on its head. So that's all kind of ways to approximate how big.

Brian Hood (2:23)

Got it. So for those who don't are familiar with the term unicorn, that typically just means a business that's valued over a billion dollars. So that's how stair stepping to passive income from freelance income can get you after years and years and years. When did you launch FreshBooks at the very beginning?

Mike McDerment (2:39)

We launched in 2004, really more like 2006, because we had no idea what we were doing, but almost two decades ago. So not exactly an overnight success, and yet still kind of one of those.

Chris Graham (2:50)

There's something beautiful and poetic about you were a freelancer and then you built a company to help freelancers, and now you are crushing it. That is so cool.

Mike McDerment (3:02)

Yeah, I have a privilege, very fortunate. It's all gone like this, and there's been lots of hard work and lots of good things behind the scenes. But yes, I was pretty early into it. When I got into freelancing, people thought it was a strange thing to be doing. Like, 99, 2000, it's like, oh, I'm sorry about that.

And the world really wasn't built for it. And so it's been one of the great joys of my life is to see how it's become, I don't want to say mainstream just yet, because I don't think it's even all the way there yet, but the world is starting to conform to being able to work for yourself, do it successfully, and have many fewer obstacles, more opportunities, and a much wider variety of roles that work in this way, which is super exciting.