The Freelancer's Guide To Automating Your Business | Part 1

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 271

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 or watching the show on YouTube, first of all, welcome. So glad to have you. This podcast is for creative freelancers who offer services, and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. That's the gist of this show. Every episode is devoted to something that will help you earn more from your creative skills, all while hopefully not selling your soul in the process. That sounds like you, you're in the right spot. If you're a returning listener, so glad to have you back. This podcast is covering a topic we really haven't talked about much in a while. I think the last time we talked about this might have been way back at episode 216, where we talked about how to spend less time doing the stuff you hate, the Easy Eights Framework. That'll be in the show notes if you want to go check that episode out. But this episode, we're going to be just dedicating an entire episode to getting started with automation as a freelancer. And this topic is highly relevant to any freelancer out there that wants to get more done in less time and avoid the stuff that you hate.

It's a really good, easy pitch for most people because these are things that you're probably avoiding anyways, so why not start to automate these things?

I think a lot of freelancers avoid the topic of automation simply because they're overwhelmed, they're intimidated by it, or they just don't know what they don't know.

And this leads to the mistake of having to do everything in your business manually. Now, a lot of freelancers, whether they realize it or not, they're probably automating a few things on accident that they didn't really know was automation, technically, because automation isn't really that scary. We'll talk about the definition of it and how we can implement it in our businesses in a minute. But because you're doing everything manually, all the things you're doing in your business take more time than it should. You end up avoiding those things because they take forever. You don't like doing them in the first place, so you just put them off until later and then later never comes. Then, because later never comes, you just forget to do the things at all. So those things never get done. But automation fixes all of these things because if something is done automatically, then you don't have to avoid it. You won't forget about it because it gets done, and it does it faster because it's automatic. So to me, automation is one of those big win-win-wins where your clients are happier because things are done faster, you're happier because things are done that you don't have to think about, and then your bank account is happy because at the end of the day, this helps you earn more. Real quick, let's talk about what is actually automation. It's pretty basic. I think most people fundamentally understand this, but I'm just going to put a definition out there.

It's when hardware or software does something automatically that you would otherwise have to do manually. And I break automation down into three main steps or three main parts. There's a trigger, there's an action, and there is a result. Actually, if you listen to a few episodes back at episode 267, the title is Turn Your Hours Into More Dollars By Fixing All Five Parts of Your Freelance Machine. That episode talked a lot about inputs and outputs, and automation is very much the same way.

There is an input, aka the trigger, there is a action that happens, and then there's an output, aka the result. And to put this into context, so you have an example of this, a trigger might be someone fills out a form on your website. That's the trigger. The action, the thing that's automatically done, is that information is sent into your CRM, your Customer Relationship Management System, and the result is now a new deal is created in your CRM. There's other examples, like someone downloads a lead magnet on your website, they fill out the form there, and then the action is an email is automatically sent to them to deliver the lead magnet, and then the result is they get access to their lead magnet. Those are kind of the easy three steps to break this all down into. And when you fundamentally understand this stuff and you start using it in your business, this solves the two things to help you make more money in your business. The only two things. The first thing is getting more clients, and the second thing is making each client worth more.