The 5 Hidden Dangers That Can Wipe Out a 6-Figure Freelance Business

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 388
Welcome to the Six 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. You can spend years and years building up a highly successful six-figure or multi-six-figure freelance business, only to have it crumbling down to dust, to nothing in a matter of months, if you don't defend yourself against a few things. So in this episode, I want to talk about specifically defense from the five hidden dangers that can wipe out a six-figure freelance business. I can speak to this, not just from experience, I've had over 10 years of freelancing experience, but also because I've coached hundreds of creatives, and I've seen way too many talented people that were wiped out, not because they sucked at something, not because they sucked at their craft, but because they just weren't protected. And one of these silent killers actually cost me five weeks of work that I had to make up for free, and could have easily been prevented, at least mitigated to some degree. So that sucked, yes. So if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls, and preferably do that for a very, very long time. So you have a long, fun, healthy career that doesn't suck. And today, like I said, we're going to dive into those five hidden killers, those silent assassins, whatever you want to call them. And I'm going to tackle these from kind of like increasing risk. And this order is generally correct, but you might disagree with some of these. The first one I want to talk about today, the thing you need to defend yourself from is just burnout. The more successful you get, the more susceptible to burnout you get. But this is that mental and physical exhaustion where you feel like you have just a shitload of stuff to do and you don't want to do a damn thing. It's like a really weird, horrible feeling. It's basically just like a loss of motivation, declining creativity, and can even be sometimes resentment towards your work, your clients, your business, anything having to do with what you actually get paid to do. If you don't defend yourself from this, you will just simply crash and burn. You'll start to see self-sabotage where you will just avoid doing things, knowing they're going to hurt you, or you'll actively do things that you know will hurt you. And I mean in your business sense, I hope not like actual self-harm, but you'll just self-sabotage your actual business. Nothing will get done. You'll neglect things. You'll ignore things. You'll gravitate towards shiny objects that pull you away from your main business. These are all signs that you're experiencing burnout. And it happens after prolonged stress and overwork due to maybe you're taking on too many clients. Things got really, really hectic. You got that really big feast mode where you're like, oh God, I don't know when the next famine period is going to come. So I just got to say yes to every single project that comes in. So I'll just take all the money that I can get right now while the getting is good. Right. So you take on way too many projects, way too many clients. You have strict deadlines or stressful deadlines. You have poor client boundaries that can lead to burnout on top of all these other things, usually without rest or without any sort of like personal time. But the reason this is first on the list isn't because it's the least detrimental to your business. You can utterly ruin your business by burnout. It's first on the list and least impactful because it's relatively easy to prevent. The thing about burnout is it doesn't just come out of nowhere. There are usually signs, symptoms. It's like a spectrum where you can be slightly burned out or you could just be extremely burned out to the point where you want to burn your business to the ground. So when it comes to preventing this, to defending yourself against burnout, there's pretty simple steps to do this. It's simple. It's not easy. And especially for the type of person who you want to people please, you want to make your clients happy, but you got to make as much money as possible. You got to take on as many projects as possible. It can be difficult. Yes, but it's very simple if you can follow these sorts of steps. So the first is just set and enforce actual work hours. My business continues to double every single year. I still only work about nine to five or eight to four every single Monday through Friday. That's my work hours. I enforce those. Rarely will you ever see me working before or after that or on the weekends. Occasionally it can come up or some little thing that slipped through the cracks that I just come in and log in my laptop and do it really quick, like on a Saturday morning, but that's exceedingly rare. I'm very, very diligent about enforcing my work hours. But beyond that, you have your work hours. I talked about this a few weeks ago in our prioritization episode, episode 384, the Power Hour Method, how Smart Feeling Answers work. It's basically during those eight hours, you can get a lot done or you can get nothing done. And if you're facing burnout, it's important that you schedule and time block, meaning when you have client projects that come in, you've set them on your calendar, you've scheduled them out ahead of time, you've essentially stacked them up in the future so that you know you're going to tackle these projects in a row and not try to dive into like six projects at one time. So you've scheduled them, and also time blocking so that you know that like, I have to do revisions no matter what. So I might as well set an hour a day after lunch, the first hour after lunch or the last hour of the day when my brain's already dead and I can't be creative, I could just do revisions. I have to do these things so I need to time block certain things that have to be done in my schedule, regardless of whatever else I have going on. Because when you start trying to fit in things in gaps that were never there, never intended to be there, that's how work spills over to the nights, into the weekends. So if you've set and enforced work hours and you have scheduled your clients out in your calendar and time blocked the little spots you need for working on your business, client revisions, to do admin work, et cetera, et cetera, that's how you start to schedule and structure your day. Again, I go more into the depths of this on episode 283, something like that. The next thing as far as avoiding burnout is just saying no. I probably should have started with this. This is a bigger one to me. Saying no, saying no is okay. Saying no to the clients you should be working with. This is that bill paying work, especially in times when you're in a feast mode and you're like, ah, what's one more project? I'll take it on, that's money in the bank, right? That's selling your soul, in my opinion. That's where we start getting danger to that selling your soul territory. Again, this podcast is earn more without selling your soul. Also saying no to projects that don't really fit into your schedule or don't fit you personally. Maybe your creativity or your style or your vibe doesn't really match the project. Being willing to say no to those. Like that project that comes in, it's like, oh, I've got to get this done next week. And you're like, well, I can get you in three months from now. How's that? And they say, no, I got to get done next week. And you're like, well, if I work over the weekend, maybe I could get it done. Just say no, it's not worth it. Especially if you're filling the burnout, come on. Saying no to requests that are unreasonable. Clients asking for things that are out of scope. We'll get more of this later. But just saying no. The more you say no in seasons of burnout, the more time and bandwidth you buy back for yourself, the more you're able to push through for a long career, not a short, powerful burnt out career that ends in a flame. If you find yourself in the position where you're getting more projects you can handle and you're finding yourself getting burnt out and you're working all the time and you're like, I don't know how I can fit more into this end and I got to start working weekends and start working nights. If you find yourself in that position, that's a perfect time to raise your rates. If you're working constantly, you have to say no all the time, that's where you start to raise your rates. If you go way back to episode 230, there's an episode called Dynamic Pricing, the secret weapon clever freelancers are using to maximize their income. That episode is essentially me talking about this at length. So if you're the type of person where you're like, I'm booked solid right now, go back and listen to that episode. Just go to sixfigurecreative.com/twothreezero.