The 6‑Star Client Experience That Doubles Referrals & Repeat Work

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 379
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. Referrals are the lifeblood of most freelancers, which is unfortunate, because you can't just go out there and get a client on demand whenever you want through referrals. But that doesn't mean referrals are bad. Anything that brings in a client is not inherently bad. It's just when we rely on that thing, as our only source of clients is when it becomes bad. But if we're only relying on referrals, or we just want a healthy business, I ask you this question. How can we get the absolute most referrals possible? That's what I'm gonna dive into in this episode. Now I'm gonna walk you through how to provide a client experience that is so amazing they would feel stupid not referring you to their peers. Now that's stolen from how to make an offer so good that people feel stupid saying no to it. But the point remains, it's not a 3 Star Experience, it's not a 4 Star Experience, not even a 5 Star Experience. It is a 6 Star Experience. It is that mythical, unattainable thing. There are not 6 Star Hotels out there, by the way. You've heard of 3 Star Hotels, 4 Star Hotels, you've heard of 5 Star Hotels. Maybe even some of you lucky people have stayed at 5 Star Hotels, but you've never stayed at a real 6 Star Hotel because they do not exist. Now there are hotels out there that market themselves as 6 Star Hotels, but there's no true 6 Star Hotel, at least not officially. But it is something to strive towards. And as a freelancer, you can strive to not just offer a 4 or a 5 Star Experience, but offer a true 6 Star Experience so that your clients would feel stupid not referring to you to someone else. Now after working with over 500 clients myself over the last 15-ish years, I've had a lot of at bats with this. I've seen what works really well. I've seen what works plain terribly. Great way to ruin client relationships. And I've seen what's just kind of, you know, what's kind of mid. And mid is not good enough to be referred. Mid is not good enough for a three-star hotel. Mid is kind of like a two-star hotel. And none of us wants to be a two-star hotel. So this episode, I'm gonna dive into all of what I feel is a six-star experience for your clients. And the fourth part of this episode is what 99% of freelancers just never do. And you are missing out on a lot of referrals and repeat work just because of that one thing. Now, if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer, you offer your skills as a service, and you want to make more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. You're in the right spot if that sounds good to you. On this podcast, I take a lot of outside influence from not just the different freelancers that I see and work with, but other industries altogether that have a completely different approach where they have really solved the problem. They call it a solved problem. A solved problem is something that has already been solved. Sounds legit. And yet freelancers try to solve problems in a way that is not the best practice because they are trying to solve a problem they have never solved before. And when another industry has mastered the solving of that problem, why would we, us plebeian basic freelancers who are unsophisticated, have very little experience running businesses, why would we not just follow the best practices of what other industries have done? That's what this podcast is all about in a multitude of different ways. So let's first talk, what actually makes it a 6 Star Experience instead of a 5 Star Experience? We're getting to subjectiveness here. A 6 Star Experience is truly subjective. The things I covered in this episode is my best attempt at giving you a way to provide a 6 Star Experience to your clients. But it's not just that you did the work well. It's not just that you're good at what you do. It's not just that your client liked how the process went or liked the end result. It's that through the entire experience from start to finish and beyond, that's a big key, and beyond, they felt guided. They had fewer questions than they expected. They got clarity. They didn't expect. They had aha moments. They had friction removed. They didn't even realize it was there. They felt confident referring you without being asked because they think, damn, this is smoother than I ever thought it would be. This is an amazing experience. That is what creates loyalty, referrals, repeat business, a pricing moat so you're not just directly compared to other freelancers. And it is building up a bunch of little things to include that experience. Anyone who's stayed at a 5 Star Hotel or a truly luxury resort or summer, just really damn nice, you can start to see all the little things at the hotels that they do to make your experience just that much better. The tiny little things. And it's those tiny little things. It's the turndown service. It's the chocolate on the pillow. It's the 24-hour room service. It's the overall design and the aesthetic. It's them putting your bags away into your room while you're checking in, so you don't have to think about it. All those little things add up to the 5 Star Experience. It's not just one thing. So let's talk to the things that I think make up a 6 Star Experience for most freelancers. The first thing is just onboarding that reduces anxiety. Instantly reduces anxiety. When you think about somebody who just pays you on the low end hundreds of dollars, on the high end thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes six figures plus for your services, think about the anxiety that that comes with. Somebody is saying, yes, I'm going to invest with you, it's likely a significant amount of money for me or my business, and god, I hope this goes well. There's a lot of anxiety with that. It's impossible for it not to be. Think about anytime that much money is at stake, everybody has their own emotional junk around money. Whether you feel like you do or you think you don't, you have emotional junk around money. And what a lot of freelancers tend to do is they get the money, they maybe send a confirmation, thanks so much, I got the payment, can't wait to start. And then it's basically crickets until when? With a kickoff call, the first email you send out, they don't know when that is. So think about the first thing you could do during onboarding to reduce anxiety. That is send a welcome video or a voice note, preferably, or a loom video, or even worst case scenario, you write it all out, here's exactly what's gonna happen, here's when things are gonna happen, and here's how we're gonna work together. That alone reduces anxiety, they know what to expect. Simply ask yourself, are you doing this or not? Most freelancers aren't doing this. And I'm gonna be honest with you here, some of the things on this list today, I don't do myself. This is an episode for me to challenge myself to think through, what do I want to include in my 6 Star Client Experience? I still have a ways to go. A lot of these things we do, some of the things we're rolling out, some things we haven't done yet, but all of these things can be done. Next is just gather the info that matches the client. So you think through the process, you've gathered the money, you're onboarding the client, you need to get information and actually to fulfill in your services. And freelancers make the mistake in one of two ways. Way one tends to be that they don't know their client well enough, especially in the B2B space, they're busy, they got a million things going on, they got a million other problems. And you ask for too much information up front. Things you could just basically, things you could have gathered by yourself. So you don't want to hand a high end client paying you tens of thousands of dollars, an onboarding questionnaire with 30 long form open ended questions. In these cases, you can afford to hunt and dig and find any information you possibly can in order to start basically pre onboarding the client instead of asking them. So for high end clients, you basically hunt and then you try to send them the minimum viable effective dose of questions in order to get started on the kickoff call. But low to mid value clients, you can't really afford to do this. You can't afford to invest the time, effort, energy in order to hunt down all the questions you need for onboarding. And so in this case, which is most free interest cases, you can kind of create an onboarding form that gathers all relevant information for the project. What I tell people here is your onboarding form should gather all the information you would need in order to kick off the project without anything else. That's a good starting point. And then from there, you can decide, hey, what makes more sense to discuss on the kickoff call versus to try to explain in writing on an onboarding form? Those are the things you can start to pull back on. But start from, I am taking this information in and I have to start the project with the information they give me and I cannot ask any other follow up questions. That's a great place to start. Because nothing's worse than having to send follow up after follow up after follow up, asking for more and more and more and more things you forgot to gather during the onboarding phase. And this is especially after you've already done the kickoff call and everything should be ready to kick off. And you're like, oh, I forgot. What's your X, Y, and Z? How do I look at this? What do you want with this?