The Freelancer’s Survival Guide | 25 Tips for Payments, Productivity, and Profit

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 340

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. Whether you've been freelancing for like a week, or a year, or a decade, I bet there are tons and tons and tons of big and small things that you don't know right now, because you don't know what you don't know. If you knew them, it could save you time, it could save you money, it could save you pain, headache, heartache, it could make you more money. And so there's a lot of little things that can make your life a little better. And I got this episode today from my wife. For those who don't know, my wife is, if you want to put it the cringiest way possible, a TikTok influencer. If you want to put it the least cringiest way possible, she is a book influencer in the TikTok space where she talks about cozy books, and cozy life, and cozy things. So go look her up, Meg's Tea Room. So her business model is she creates content for her hundreds of thousands of followers, and people pay for her to promote their products or books or services or whatever. So she ends up working with a lot of different businesses, creating posts for them and getting paid for those posts. I was baking a couple loaves of sourdough this week, and so she casually brought up a complaint that she hated about her business, and something she had to do all the time in it. And I was like, honey, you don't have to do that anymore. You can do it one time. And thus this podcast was born. I'll tell you what that thing was as tip number one today in the 25 tips episode today for your Freelance Survival Guide. If you've never listened to this podcast before, this podcast is called 6 Figure Creative. Hi, I'm Brian Hood, your podcast host. I have built a multi-6 Figure Freelance business, ran for over a decade. I have built other 6 Figure Income streams, I think 5 or 6 or 7 now at this point, a 7 Figure Income stream. And so I'm just a serial entrepreneur. This podcast I created for creative freelancers who want to make more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. That sounds like you, you're on the right spot. So let's get to tip number one today. I've got 25 down, maybe there's some bonuses in here, but it's called Around 25 And this comes from my wife's complaint. She was complaining that she hated having to send W9s to all of the companies she works with. If you're in America and you don't already know when a company hires you and they pay you more than, I think, $600 in a calendar year, you have to send them a W9 so that they can send you a 1099 A lot of numbers, a lot of tax things. If you know, you know, it doesn't really matter. But here's what does matter. You do not have to create a brand new W9 every single time you send one off to a company. My wife was filling out a brand new one every single time. So filling out all her information, all her address stuff, her social security number, her signing things, dating things, scanning and uploading every single time. And I didn't know that until she complained about it. And I was like, honey, you just have to create one W9 for the tax year of 2024 It's the end of the year now, so this is not super helpful, but it'll be really helpful for you next year in 2025 You create one W9 for the entire year and you just save it. Call it Brian Hood W9 2025 underscore signed, because you can have a signed or an unsigned version and save it on your hard drive. And you can always find it. And anytime someone asks for a W9 from you, you just resend that same one over and over and over again. That is tip number one. Small things that make your life a little bit better. That brings us to tip number two today. And that is if you are a sole proprietor, which is most freelancers I think listen to the show are sole proprietors. Some of you have gone the LLC route, which I recommend in certain circumstances. It's not a tax episode, by the way, just the first two are about taxes. If you're a sole proprietor, that means when you fill out your tax forms, your W9s or any other tax forms, you have to put your personal social security number on that tax form. Did you know that you can actually apply for an EIN, an employer identification number? That is a number that government can assign to your business, even if you're a sole proprietor, you can use in all your tax documents for your business. And that way, when you fill out tax documents, you're not having to put your personal social security numbers, a little bit better for your identity security. Tip number three, this gets us out of the tax world and into the payment worlds. That is a tip that I love, and that is add late fees to your contracts, which sounds really mean, right? Someone's gonna pay you money, you put in the contract. If you're late, then it's gonna be X amount per month or per day or whatever on top of the fee, or it might be just a flat late fee if your payment is late. Here's the fun part. You don't actually have to enforce this late fee. This late fee there is just so that they know that if they pay late, there's a consequence to it. And what you'll find is just having the late fee, even if you never enforce it, just having the late fee will get your clients to pay things on time, which is always a good thing. No one likes sitting around waiting for a payment to come in that you thought was coming in this month, and you have bills to pay, and then it doesn't come in. No one likes that. So if you put a late fee in your contract, you explain it to your clients, say, hey, we have a 10% late fee. If you miss our due dates on our invoices, guarantee you'll get more on-time payments. This is kind of a bonus tip aside from that, but this is still tip number three. Better yet, just get paid in advance for everything. That way you never have to become a debt collector. You never have to worry about late fees. In all my current businesses and everything I've ever done before, as far as I can remember, everything I've done, I got paid in advance for. So when I was doing music production, I got paid in advance for all the music. I got a 40% non-refundable deposit to even put the dates on my calendar, and then on the first scheduled day of recording or the first scheduled day of mixing, I got the remaining balance. That way I was always paid for work before I did the work, and I never had to worry about chasing down funds. There was only exceptions when I was working with record labels, but even with record labels, I got a 50% deposit up front, because that's just a standard thing to do in the industry. So you can still get deposits, at least half the payment up front, before you do the work, so you can at least get something. Tip number 4, staying in the payments world, is just another way you can position the late fee. This is for those of you who just hate the idea of having a late fee on your invoices or in your client agreements.