Speed is King | Why Your Freelance Business Is A Hot Mess 🤮

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 370
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 this podcast has been around for a really long time. This is episode 370, something like that. There's a weekly show, and I do the math, weekly show 370 episode is like 6.6 years. It's actually a little longer than that because we had a small hiatus of like six months between episode 150, 151, something like that. It was a rebrand back then. I bring this up to say, over the years, I've seen a lot of people who need help with running their freelance business. And we've also coached hundreds of clients in the last just several years alone. And people have come to me with their massive laundry list of shit that they have tried and failed in order to grow their business. They've tried networking, they've tried cold outreach, they've tried paid ads, they've tried blogging, they've tried podcasting, they've tried social media. They've tried asking for more referrals, they've tried pivoting to a new niche, they've tried launching new pricing plans, new packages, a billion other things. And yet the one thing they never have is data. And no, this is not a data episode. Don't like back out now by, oh, God, I don't want to watch another data episode. You already did that back on episode 332 It's called the seven must track metrics that will make you more money in 2025 Good episode, but that's not what we're talking about today. I bring this up because this pattern shows up again and again and again and again for freelancers because you're unsophisticated. You don't know how to run a business. You're literally just coasting through life with spaghetti marketing. You're throwing shit at the wall, hoping that something sticks. And these random acts of marketing are just things you picked up here and there from this podcast, from other podcasts, what you saw from Alex Hamozi, what you saw from other influencer there. But at the end of the day, you're flying blind. You have no idea how to fix all the bad shit that's happening in your business or the good things that are happening in your business. You have no idea how to keep making it happen because again, you're flying blind and just throwing things at the wall. You have no idea really what works, what doesn't work, why things don't work, why things do work, and so this episode, I want to talk about three core things to learn about your business ASAP. This is a self-reflection, self-information, self-learning episode because most people go their entire freelance careers, never learning these three things. And the reason I want you to learn these three things is because it brings consistency in your business. Consistency. Remember that word, consistency. We actually just did a deep dive survey where we sent out a survey to our entire like 60,000 person email list or how many people we have. We're trying to learn what your struggles are, what your goals are, what you're trying to do. It helps this podcast, it helps us with a lot of things, but the word consistency showed up so many times. And if you want consistency, that means you need consistent results. And if you want consistent results, you need to take consistent effort. If you want to take consistent effort, you need consistent work. And if you want to take consistent work, you need actually confidence in what you're doing. And confidence comes from learning. And by learning these three things that most freelancers never learn, you will be confident enough to put in consistent work, which will provide enough results so that you're willing to give consistent effort. And that consistent effort will give you consistent results, which is what you want. And those consistent results are, again, the thing that you're likely missing right now, to give you consistency, which is why you have the ups and downs, recent famines, maybe why you're in a big slump right now. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, or maybe you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative podcast. This is a company that was just me a long time ago, and now it's 11 people from all over the world, from California to Nevada, to Tennessee, to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to Vermont, to Portugal, to Romania, to Israel, all the way to New Zealand. This is a global company now. And most of my team has built six figure or multiple six figure businesses. Three have been heads of marketing at seven and eight figure companies, and three have built seven figure or multiple seven figure companies of their own. So this podcast is a conglomeration of all our ideas, all of our perspectives from our entire team's diverse background, plus the hundreds of clients that we coach, plus all the industries that all of us look to when we're learning marketing, sales, fulfillment, when we're learning best practices for processes. We take all of those things up and we package them for episodes for this podcast so that you, Mr. and Mrs. Creative Freelancer, can run a better business that brings you more money without having to sell yourself in the process. So that sounds like something you're interested in. You're in the right place. So before we get into the three things I want you to learn about your business, I want to talk through first things that get in the way, because I can tell you all day about what to do, but the problem is the reason you're not doing it is because there's things that are getting in the way, and those things are sabotaging you and your business. So I've got a list of things that are actually holding you back in multiple ways, not just this way that we're going to talk about today, the things that you need to learn about your business, but these things hold you back in almost every way. And these are really common for freelancers, so it's worth discussing here. And the first thing I want to talk through is overcomplicating. Some of our clients are this way. We call them internally complexifiers. So if you're a complexifier on our client roster, I'm going to call you out right now. But a complexifier or someone who overcomplicates is someone who turns even the simplest task into a major project. There's a Charlie Day meme from, it's always said in Philadelphia. I'm pulling up on the screen here if you're watching on YouTube, but it represents the overcomplicator or the complexifier. Maybe you've seen this before. It's Charlie Day in his business casual shirt with a tie and khakis and a belt. And he's facing the screen with a crazed look on his face, holding a pen and his arms referencing back on the board behind him. And behind him is just papers all over the wall with lions attaching things to each other. And the meme that I pulled up just for this episode, and it says, me planning the hundreds of different ways as simple upcoming two minute social interaction can play out. You've probably done this in your own business. You've taken something super simple and you've overcomplicated to the point where you can't even make a choice now. You can make a decision. You've overthought it. You've overcomplicated it. So I want to give a real life example of a client we work with who did this. And I want to just talk through, I'm going to throw one of the butts for a second, but obviously I'm not going to name names, but these examples come from real situations that can represent things that you've likely done yourself in an effort to illustrate how overcomplicated you can make something very, very simple. So the scenario is this. We're helping a client with their pricing. They were struggling with how can they accurately reflect project profitability in the spreadsheet. For context, he was in an agency. He has to factor in profit margins with team members.