The 5-Step Blueprint for Perfect Client Onboarding | The Infinite Clients Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 293

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, hi. Hello, welcome to the show. This is your first time. Cool. This podcast is for you.

If you are a freelancer who offers creative services and you want to make more money from your services or your creative skills without selling your soul, if that sounds like you, you're in the right place. For my returning listeners, and if you're new, I have to publicly apologize to Christo over at The Future. If you listen to this podcast, you don't know who Christo is. I don't know what to tell you. Apparently, I stole something from him. I was not called out. I just literally found this yesterday.

Hiring or interviewing people for a new coach role here at 6 Figure Creative.

Somehow we got on to talking about the future and we went to the site.

And one of the things that we looked at was their about page.

On their about page, it says something about helping creatives or freelancers or helping you earn more money without losing your soul. Something like that.

I thought, man, has Christo stolen this from me? My podcast intro that I've been saying for dozens, maybe a hundred plus episodes. That's the first thought that came to my mind. It's like, someone stole that from me.

It turned out I probably stole it from him. There's a thing called a way back machine. If you're familiar with what this is, it's like internet archive. You can look up versions of pages as long as they've existed. Just Google way back machine or something. And my petty self had to look and just see how long has he been doing that? When did I start saying this on the podcast? And I looked back as far as like November, 2021, and that page has been the same.

I didn't start saying this in the intro till probably like 2022 So then I looked at myself in the mirror and said, Brian, you thief.

You are a piece of crap. I'd probably seen it before because I'm not going to pretend like I don't know who they exist. They're freaking awesome. All the stuff that Chris does is amazing.

But I just had to say, if you ever have noticed that and thought, man, did Brian steal that from him? Yes, I did. Will I stop saying it? I don't know. We say it a little differently. He says, without losing your soul. I say without selling your soul. Potato, potato. But just had to call myself out for that and apologize publicly for even thinking to myself that he'd stolen it from me.

Chris has got way better things to do than steal stuff from the 6 Figure Creative.

Okay, what are we talking about today? Today is our continuation in the Infinite Client Series. If you are new to this series, this is your first episode, or you've been skipping around, or you just happened to pick up for this episode, this is a series. It'll probably last for a while on answering the question, what would it look like if every single client that hired us referred at least one more client to you? If that were the case, you would have essentially infinite clients. You get like three clients, those clients refer three more clients to you, those clients refer three more clients to you, and so on and so on. You have a viral business, it's amazing. It's not a realistic goal for pretty much anybody, but it's one that we can strive towards by having a better service, by keeping our clients happy.

And so I have a whole series planned on this because it's something we don't talk about a lot, at least not from this perspective on the podcast.

And we're continuing it today. Last week, we talked about the Rock Solid eight-part client agreement that'll make sure expectations are set, that nobody is going into the project thinking something that doesn't actually happen is going to happen.

So that's last week's episode. This week, we're talking about essentially the remaining steps on my five-part ultimate client onboarding process.

If you're like Brian, I don't want to listen to you, I'd rather just read through a document. Go to 6figurecreative.com/onboarding, and you'll get a PDF that covers pretty much all five steps that we're gonna talk about, the remaining four in this episode if we have time. I've got four more. Last week was the client agreement, that's step one. And today we're gonna talk about how to create an onboarding questionnaire that gets the information you need from your clients. We're gonna talk about reviewing that questionnaire and actually creating three documents that I think are essential for making sure the project goes smoothly. We're gonna talk about a kick-ass, kick-off call with your client. I think there's some situations, but very few situations where you shouldn't do a kick-off call with your client before the project begins, or you can even call it day one of the project. Everyone's different, but that's what I'll talk through, hopefully, this episode. And then the fifth and final step of the ultimate onboarding process, as we call it, is follow up for dear life. And I'll explain what that means, because all this stuff is very important. And the whole point of all this is to make sure that every project runs smoothly. Onboarding a client is basically getting all the stuff we need to actually fulfill all the services that we're offering. And every single little thing you mess up in this onboarding process is one more little knock against you, one little ding. It can be a little small things, but it's like at a RPG, and you're doing like one HP damage to the little rat that you got to fight at the beginning of the, your level one in any RPG. Always got to fight a rat somewhere. I don't know what that's about, a giant rat, actually. It might be just be one HP at a time, but that starts to really, really tick away at their HP, aka how happy they are with you. And honestly, some of the little small ball drops you can mess up in onboarding can fester into huge gaping toxic wounds, gangrenous, gangreous, I don't know how to say it, but that's where wounds have to cut it off because you have gangrene in your arm or leg. That's the kind of stuff that can happen if you mess this part up. And the whole goal, again, is to make every client so ecstatic, so happy, so thrilled that they work with you, that they refer at least one new client to you. And to get to that level, which is an impossible goal, we have to nail onboarding. So that's the topic of this episode, and maybe one more. It just depends on how long this episode goes. I'm a talker. Someone's asking me about short-form content. They were kind of like in that weird meeting between like two and three minutes where it's like on the borderline, no longer short-form content. And they're asking if they should bring it over to YouTube for like longer form.