The 3 Best Ways To Graduate From "Simple Freelancer" To A "True Entrepreneur" With Multiple Income Streams

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 270

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.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show today, first of all, welcome. This podcast is for creative freelancers who want to earn more from their creative skills, and you want to do that without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot for my returning listeners. So glad to have you back. I got an awesome episode planned today. This isn't a topic that I've kind of been avoiding talking about because it's only relevant to what I would consider a small percentage of the listeners, but it's a really important topic that very few people ever really talk about. So I wanted to have an entire episode dedicated to what I call graduating from freelancing. It's when you've hit that $100,000 a year mark. For some people, it might be multiple 6 figures a year. And you've hit this plateau where you've tapped out what you can do.

Everyone hits this at a different limit, but there's only so much work you can do as a freelancer before you just hit that upper limit. For me, it was about $180,000 to $200,000 a year as a freelancer doing audio production or music production. And what can happen when you hit this limit is that we start feeling satisfied. We start getting complacent. We start thinking too small. We start thinking, all right, I have arrived. I am successful now. And if you aren't there yet, maybe you're somebody who's at the beginning of your journey right now and you haven't quite hit that 6 Figure mark or that part where you feel like you've plateaued out, you will eventually hit this. So it's so good to know what your journey will end up at at some point. And a lot of freelancers, they fall into this trap and it's a wonderful place to be. It's still a trap. It's where you have a 7 Figure skill set stuck into a 6 Figure opportunity. And I've just seen this time and time and time and time. Again, I've seen this from close friends. I've seen this from acquaintances. I've seen this from my own peers. I've seen this from people that I know of, that I don't know personally. And it's always a very similar path. They spend years honing their craft. They work their way up the ladder. They do all the right things. They get their careers to this point, and then they just plateau. Many of them end up just coasting for a long time, and they start to feel stagnant. I think as human beings, we're just meant to progress in some way, to feel like we're always moving forward towards something new.

And that's why most video games have this level progression system, especially RPGs, because we just like to have this sense of progression in our lives. And it's like if you were playing the same level on a video game over and over and over and over again, every day, it would get old. It would start to feel stagnant, and you would start to question whether or not you're doing the right thing. So my hope for this episode is that it spurs some of you ahead that might be in this position where you really aren't reaching the impact that you could reach if you were able to move outside of your very limited bubble that you're in right now that you've worked yourself into. Because I've seen people who spend 20 plus years building a name for themselves, building out that T-shaped skill set as a freelancer that I talked about on episodes 235 and 236 where I talk about the full-stack freelancer. All of those amazing relationships and that network that you've built up. But in the last five, 10 years, you probably have started to feel stagnant a bit. And if you're happy with where you're at, by the way, if you're happy doing the same thing over and over every day, even if you've hit that upper limit and you're completely satisfied, that's not who I'm talking to. If that's you and you're the type of person who can do that and feel fulfilled and satisfied and feel like they're not wasting an opportunity or not moving towards something that they should be doing, if that's you, move along. But this is for those people who fill that sense of a deeper calling from what they should be doing, and they want to maybe entertain the idea of what might be considered graduating from freelancing. This is where you start to stretch and work those entrepreneurial muscles. And if you do this for the wrong reason, this is literally what I talk about at the beginning of every episode, you're earning more at the expense of selling your soul. We don't want that. But if you do it for the right reasons, then I truly believe you're stepping into your calling.