The 6 BARE MINIMUM Rules For Solid Client Communication | The Infinite Client Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 294

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 ever listening to the show, welcome, hi, hey, hello. So glad to have you. This podcast is for you. If you are a creative freelancer, you offer creative services and you want to earn more money from those creative skills without selling your soul.

If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. For my returning listeners, we are off to the races, continuing our Infinite Client Series, which if you are brand new and you don't know what that means, it is our attempt at creating such an incredible experience for our clients that every single client that we work with refers at least one more client to us. If you can do that, you will literally have infinite clients because two clients return into four clients, four clients to turn into eight clients. I can't do math. Eight clients return into 16, 16 to 32, 32, 64 We're talking like in bits of RAM now. Infinite clients, it is a lofty goal. It is probably an impossible goal, but it's something that we are discussing theoretically what we need to do in order to make that happen. So today's episode is going to continue that series. Before I get into that, gotta say, 6 Figure Creative, we've just added on a new team member. We got a new full-time person, our second full-time coach for our clients by design. Maybe he'll come on the podcast at some point, but this is an exciting week for us. His name's Josh. He's got a background in design, starting off as a freelancer through college, and then he joined a startup in the UK and did all the branding for that. It's a company called Gusto. It's like a food prep company, did all their branding.

He went on to transition to marketing and was head of marketing for an 8 Figure company and did that for four years, led a team of six people there, and then went back to the freelancing game, built a 5 Figure Recurring Revenue Freelance design business, and then now is coaching for us full-time, which is freaking awesome. So welcome, Josh, to the team. We had over 500 applications for this position.

Mid-December through mid-January was kind of our hiring period for this role. Over 500 applications, and it came down to two really top two great people, really good candidates.

But anytime I see somebody like Josh, who has a background in freelancing and a really strong stint as head of marketing at a eight-figure company, that's the type of person I want to work for me. So if you've been holding off joining Clients by Design, our coaching program for client acquisition for any reason whatsoever, now's the time to join it, because Josh will be one of your coaches. So let's shift things back, shift gears back to the Infinite Client series. The topic of today's episode is going to be all centered around client communication.

Sounds boring. A lot of the stuff sounds boring, but it's incredibly important because most freelancers, if we're being honest with ourselves, we suck at communicating with our clients.

Look at the sign behind me that says, it takes more than passion. We fall into our freelance careers because we're passionate about it. And that means that we have an insane, inquenchable thirst for learning about that creative pursuit. But that also means that a lot of the other skills fall to the wayside, like communication, understanding how to communicate.

So we're not bad at communicating on purpose. It's just that we are not equipped to handle this at a professional level, especially someone like me. The only jobs I ever had was I was a janitor at Point Mallard Water Park in Decatur, Alabama, in my teens. I worked at Burger King for four months before I was fired. And I worked at GameStop for two years in my late teens, maybe into my 20th birthday, something like that. And those are the only three jobs that I think I've ever worked in my life.

So I have no corporate experience, no college experience.

I have no experience working on a massive team.

I am the prototypical creative freelancer who came up without any of these skills.

But we just don't know what we don't know. So when we first start taking on clients, and even for my people that are in the six figure, multiple six figure range, you still fall into these traps where you have no boundaries with your clients when it comes to communication, no rules around how you're going to communicate, no expectations set for the client about how communication should occur or should not occur, and no systems put into place to make everything run smoothly. And because of this, we end up missing messages, we end up dropping balls, we end up looking flaky to our clients, we end up letting our clients walk all over us, our clients get pissed at us.