The Busy Freelancer's Guide To Getting Your Time Back (By Building Systems That Scale) | With Rachael Mueller

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 220

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 an 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.

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, and this is your first time joining us on the show. Thank you so much for giving us a chance. The goal of this podcast, at least the way I see it, is to answer two of the hardest questions we have to answer as freelancers. First question being, I'm good at what I do, now how do I get clients, or how do I get more clients if I don't have enough clients? The second question being, I'm good at what I do, I have enough clients, now what do I do to get my time back so I'm not spending all day, every day doing a bunch of admin tasks I shouldn't be doing, or just working in the business all day, every day, doing the non-creative tasks.

How do I get our time back? Well, today's episode is all about getting our time back. We have a wonderful guest lined up who is a systems expert. But before I get into that, if you are a returning listener to this show, thank you so much for coming back. I really appreciate everyone who gives this show a chance every single week. We are on YouTube, on Spotify, wherever you want to listen to us, we are here for you. And I never want to lose perspective of what it means to have your trust in me every week. Like I want to bring on great guests for you. I want to make sure we bring the coolest insights into what's working in my business and with my team.

Quick update for me, I should be in the middle of my adventure in Bali right now. I'm recording the center before I leave because we batched a bunch of episodes just so easy. We were like a month and a half ahead while I'm on the road because the time zone difference between Bali and the US is just so crazy. It's like literally a 12 hour time zone difference.

So trying to schedule interviews, there's no way. If you've been following me on Instagram, just kind of keeping up with stories of what I've been posting. I usually just tag my wife because she's better at keeping track of everything anyways. And I'm usually just reposting the stories that she posts because she's a way better content creator than I am. I mean, she has like, as the time I record this, over 60,000 followers on TikTok. She is a content creation master. And I don't really know why I haven't brought her on the podcast to talk about that. Maybe I will while I'm in Bali. Maybe I'll interview my own wife if anyone wants to hear that. But back to the topic at hand today. Today's guest is what I called earlier as a systems expert. And she goes by something called a virtual COO, a virtual chief operations officer, I think something like that, where she helps business owners like us. She works predominantly with service providers in the creative world. So she's a perfect guest for this audience.

And a lot of you will probably want to hire her by the time we're done with this episode. But she helps service providers like us build out systems in our businesses so that we're not stuck in the weeds all day every day. And the whole conversation today is based really around what I consider like a logical way to do this yourself. So if you don't have the means to hire her, or you don't want to hire her, or you just want to do it all yourself, we talk through what I consider the three major parts to get this done. First, we talked through planning systems out. How do you actually get it out of your head onto somewhere, on a paper, onto a mind map, whatever you want to use to get it out of your brain? We talk through how to actually create the systems, how to organize the systems, how do we build out the systems? And then the third thing we talk about is what tools do we use to store the systems and use the systems? How do we manage the systems once we've built them? This is a really broad, complex subject when we really dive into this.

But the way she breaks it down, I had so many things in my brain turning on as far as how I can make my businesses more efficient, because I have multiple businesses at this point, to make each element of my life more efficient.