The 6 Ways To RUIN Your Freelance Services | The Freelance F*ckups Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 264

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 listening to the podcast, first of all, hi, hey, hello, welcome. This is a show for creative freelancers who are good at what they do, a really important part there, and they're trying to earn more from their creative skills without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you are in the right spot for my returning listeners and viewers on YouTube. Welcome back, glad to have you back. It is a new week. It is the 4th of July week is the time that I record this, and I feel like this is the week I'm finally gonna get ahead on the podcast. I've got a loaf, two loaves of sourdough bread downstairs, bulk fermenting right now. I've been getting back into sourdough. I'm stoked for that. I'll put some of my Instagram stories if I get a decent loaf last week was awful flat, dense, gross loaves that we ate like a slice of and threw away. Here's the key to an amazing sourdough starter. This is the thing that was messing with me last week, really underactive starter using rye flour in your starter, 50% rye flour, 50% white flour. That sucker overnight, boom, doubled in size. So if you don't know anything about sourdough, you're not following along right now, my apologies, but I'm stoked to see how the response is today because I had an incredibly active sourdough starter overnight, and we'll see how it goes today. Fingers crossed. The topic today is not sourdough. The topic of this podcast is not sourdough, and this is not a sourdough show. Although if I wanted to have more YouTube subscribers, I probably could just do only sourdough content because a lot of those people have like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subs on YouTube, but that's not my show here. We're going to continue our series on freelance f***ups.

Again, this is a wonderful series for our editor because he gets to do a lot of bleeps, which is fun. F***ups, f***ups, f***ups.

Sorry, Leland. We're going to cover something today that all of us have to get right, and that is fulfillment on what we offer as freelancers. If you think about this, like this is something you absolutely must not get wrong because you are literally getting paid to fulfill on something. If you mess this up in any way, shape or form, you are setting yourself up for a really, really frustrating freelance journey. So this episode, I want to cover six freelance f***ups that are ruining your fulfillment experience as a freelancer, thus leading to you dropping the ball, which means clients are less likely to refer you or ever come back to you and probably create more pain in the ass clients and pain in the ass projects and more headache overall. Because if you're guilty of any of these six f***ups, especially the first one, you're in for a world of hurt.

So let's dive into this. Freelance f***up number one.

And this is my favorite on the list because this is the thing that has cascading effects. If you mess up this one thing or if you fall into this one trap, it needs you to stop. And that is you're trying to be a master of too many things.

I see this in every conceivable niche, every single service, every single industry in the freelance world, the creative freelance world. I see it from photographers, for example, where you're trying to do headshots, you're trying to do corporate events, you're trying to do lifestyle photography, you're trying to work with influencers, you're trying to do photo editing as a service. I see this in the audio industry for sure. You're trying to do mixing, you're trying to do mastering, you're trying to do guitar reamping, drum resampling, you're trying to do full service music production, songwriting, and you're trying to do it in every genre possible. I see this in videography, just like photographers. You're trying to do music videos, you're trying to do the sky's limit. Every service has people that fall into this trap, and there's usually two mindsets that lead to this f**k up. Mindset number one, if I offer more services, I will make more money, because I made $3,000 last year in doing music videos, and I made $5,000 last year doing events, and I made $15,000 last year in doing content for educators or influencers or course creators or something like, and if I just offer more services, I can get up to 6 figures. That is backwards thinking, and we'll talk about that in a second, but the other mindset that leads to this is the creative dilemma of, oh, I love to do all these things, so I'm just gonna do all these things.