The 3 Building Blocks of a Fine-Tuned Freelance Business

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 247

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 am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining us on the show, first of all, welcome. I'm glad to have you here. This show is for entrepreneurial creative freelancers who want to make more from their freelancing skills without selling their soul. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place right now. If you're a returning listener or viewer on YouTube right now, welcome back, my 6 Figure Sexies. That name, by the way, the 6 Figure Sexies, was what our group named itself years ago.

And for some reason, it's stuck because it's such a stupid, ridiculous name. And I need to come up with a better name for our audience. I haven't used this in forever, but I would love for people to go to 6figurecreative.com/better, B-E-T-T-E-R, and fill out that quick survey. And it's just a few questions. You can answer one or all, or just a couple of the answers in that survey. Take about a minute, maybe. But that will give me some really important information in order to make this show better, like what should I call our listeners? It's not gonna be the 6 Figure Sexies. I'm sorry, that's not gonna be the official terminology I use for this audience. I'm so sorry.

As much as I love to hate that name, as long as it's stuck around, since probably like 2019, it's not gonna continue in 2023 and beyond. So that's my ask for our returning listeners. If you're new, let's just get to the point of what the show's about today. So today, I wanna talk about what goes into building, for lack of a better term, a freelance machine. For any of our creators out there, especially you, IndieGram4s, the thought of your business being a machine is probably the most soul sucking idea possible, but I cannot think of a better terminology to use for what is really going on underneath the hood of a struggling freelance business. And I wanna paint the picture first. In a perfect world, what does your business look like as a freelancer when all things are working, when the engine is humming smoothly, when all the elements are finely tuned, everything is in place, it needs to be there. What does it look like? What does it feel like even? And here's the perfect freelance business in my opinion. Your perfect clients send you inquiries every single month, preferably one a day or more, to the point where you have more than you can possibly handle. That's the perfect freelance business. You have way more demand for your services and your time than you actually have in supply, which means you're naturally gonna raise your rates over time.

Projects run smoothly. Every single client that comes to you, they're happy with what they get from you.

They have very few revisions, if any. They refer their friends to you. They come back to you again, again, and again, and again for life. Or if it's a recurring kind of client, depending on your business model, they stay with you for life. They never cancel. They never say, hey, we've got to move on. Our budgets are getting cut back this year. Or hey, it's just not really working out. We need to cancel. And then the way that would feel is you would feel stability. You would feel confident. You would feel less stressed because you know that clients are coming in every single month. You know that the clients that you are getting are running smoothly. It's not eating away at your soul. You're probably doing less of the things that you don't want to do more of the things that you do want to do, right? That's how it should be. Now there's always going to be things you have to do that you don't want to do. That's just the reality of any business on earth ever. You're never going to find a perfect business, and your business is probably never going to feel exactly this way. But chances are, the further you are from this ideal, the more pieces of the entire machine you are missing. And I want to talk about three missing or maybe broken pieces of your freelance business machine. And I want to compare this, so we're all on the same page here, as to my thought process behind this and how this might actually play out in your business. I want to compare this to a car, because most of us, especially Americans, we love our cars. We have probably more cars than people in this country at this point. But every car has pieces that are just nice to have, but they don't make or break the vehicle. Things like a sunroof, radio, a backup camera in your car, like when you're backing up, the camera comes on, like a remote start so that you can start your car.