These 13 Counterintuitive Truths About Freelancing Will Change How You Work

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 352

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. A lot of freelancers feel like they know the basics of how to run their business. But the problem is, a lot of those basic assumptions are wrong. For example, let me know if any of these things are things that you've thought of for your own business recently that you should be doing. Maybe you thought, I need to get more clients, or I need to work more so that I can make more money, or I need to get better at my craft so I can attract higher quality clients, or freelancing is very unstable. Maybe I should focus on passive income or something like that in order to stabilize my income. Diversification, right? Or one of my favorites, I need to send out that proposal ASAP. If you ever thought about those things for yourself, they may be 100% wrong for you. So today, I'm diving into the 13 most counterintuitive truths about freelancing. Some of these might either surprise you or even make you rethink how you're actually running your business. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative podcast. This podcast is for creatives who want to earn more without selling their souls. And the way we help you earn more in this podcast specifically is we take a lot of influences from outside industries and outside people and bring them into this industry. Because I've learned long, long ago, the best marketers are not freelancers, the best systems and automation people are not freelancers, the best pricing and packaging people are not freelancers, the best differentiation, the best messaging people are not freelancers. With the exception of maybe copywriters. Copywriters get messaging pretty well. But you get what I'm saying here. There's a lot of skills that goes into being a good freelancer, a well-rounded freelancer, or what we call a full-stack freelancer. And in the show, I try to bring outside influences in here to tell us what we're doing wrong. Oh, especially sales. Sales is another one of those. But in this episode, we're going to explore the 13 counterintuitive truths, things that sound good on the outside, but they're actually counterintuitive, things that may not make sense at first, but I'll explain each of these in turn. I think the last two are ones I've seen most recently and are things I think every freelancer on Earth need to hear. So number one, let's start with number one today. First counterintuitive truth is you don't need more clients. You need better clients. We regularly work with clients who come to us to help them with client acquisition, who unsurprisingly want more clients. And there's nothing wrong with wanting more clients necessarily. But in a lot of cases, you don't need more clients. You need better clients. And so with a lot of these freelancers, they'll come to us like there's one that we're working with right now. He's worked with like 58 clients over the past 12 months. It's a lot of clients. Time after time, people come to us and they've worked with a good amount of clients over the last 12 months. But they're working 40 to 50 hours a week. They're making 50 to $100,000 a year. They want to get to say a quarter of a million a year, $250,000 a year. That's their goal. But the math doesn't compute. How do you go from 50 to $100,000 a year up to a quarter of a million dollars a year? How do you more than double your income when you're already working 40 to 50 hours a week? Now, there's plenty of stuff on the systems and processes and fulfillment and that whole side of things that can help alleviate some of that. But the truth is, you don't need more clients, more projects. You need fewer clients, fewer projects at a higher value. So instead of constantly going after more and more and more and more clients, thinking that if I just get more clients, I'm going to make more money, instead focus on getting fewer higher value clients, retaining them for a long time so they come back to you again and again and again and again, whether it's recurring or reoccurring work, and find the clients that actually value the work that you do. And sometimes it takes a ton of work to do this, which the work is worth it. And sometimes this is just as simple as raising your rates. Many people don't understand supply and demand and pricing. When your demand goes up and your time goes down, your price has to go up to accommodate for that. You have fewer supplies of hours, you have less supply of time, more client demand, so your prices have to go up. So that's the first counterintuitive truth. It's not more clients, it's better clients, higher paying clients. And this leads us to number two, and it's kind of in line with this first counterintuitive truth, is you don't have to work more hours to make more money. This is something that freelancers are really bad at doing, is separating their brain from time and money. You're not being paid for time, you're being paid for some sort of outcome or some sort of result. And unsurprisingly, again and again and again and again, the most successful freelancers that I work with are the people who charge for the results that they give their clients, not necessarily the time that goes into that. And the best ones are the ones who have put such a good process together, they've streamlined it so well, that they can systematically deliver the results of the client for less and less time on their end. So that's usually a productized service, something with a retainer, but anything that makes a disproportional amount of value based on the amount of time that you spent on it. This is a lesson I learned back in 2014, where I was doing this kind of work, where a lot of freelancers are, where every project looks different. Everything's so unique and so different. There's a lot of little things you have to do for every single client, very hard to systemize, very hard to productize, and so it's very hard to detach your time from your income in that regard, especially when you're working closer with a client. So in my world, it was music production. I was in the studio with the bands, recording them, and so it's a lot of moving parts, a lot of interfacing directly with clients, and every project, unsurprisingly, looked vastly different from the last. So it was really hard to create a good flow, a good production system to get people from start to finish in an efficient way. So I was literally just charging per day at the time. So literally, in order to make more money, I had to charge more at the time. In 2015, I made the shift where I stopped recording bands, and I just did mixing and mastering. And for those who don't know, mixing and mastering is just where you make the song sound good that were recorded in another studio. So I didn't have to record or produce the bands anymore. I didn't have to work directly with the clients interfacing them face to face. I just got files sent to me. I did my creative thing, and I made them sound amazing. And that I was able to turn into a much more productized service with a lot of help with templates, with automations, with help from an assistant to do a lot of the non-creative tasks. And that I was able to bring my income up to over 300 bucks an hour. Instead of 300 a day, it was like 300 an hour. But that was the first and definitely the last time that I learned how to separate my time from dollars. So in a lot of cases, if you are stuck in a place where the way you do your rates, the way you get paid is based on how many hours or how many days you work, that is the first way to fix this is by detaching the outcome you provide, which in my case was music production or music mixing. The bands want the songs to sound good. That's the easiest way to say it in layman's terms. I was able to separate that outcome from the amount of time I spent with them. So I could spend fewer hours providing that same outcome with the client and disproportionately increase my income. And this naturally leads into unconventional truth number three, working fewer hours can make you more money. Now, obviously you have to have already detached your time from your dollars in order for this truth to be an actual truth and not a lie, right? To work fewer hours and make more money, those two things have to be separated, your dollars and your hours. That's not all though, because as creatives, when we work more and we hit this burnout point, we are now less creative, because we're working all the time. We start to resent our clients. We start to be able to make fewer good decisions or fewer good outcomes for our clients because we're overworked. And by the way, this can happen whether or not we've separated time from dollars. So like that first step I just talked about in Unconditional Truth Number 2, is you don't have to work more to make more. We also don't want to work more whether or not we separated those two things, because I also did that. I separated my dollars from hours. I was making 300 bucks an hour, and I still worked myself too much where I was taking on too many projects because Mr. Businessman Brian over here wanted to make more money. And I still overworked myself, and then I ended up burning myself out. In 2017, I went to Thailand for five weeks. I didn't work at all. And then when I came home, it took three months to recover from that because I lost so much momentum in my life and my business. So I learned a hard lesson then. Awesome trip though, would recommend. But when we tap out all of our creativity, and it's just gone and we're drained, how can we possibly sell creativity as a service? Because that's what we're ultimately doing here as creatives. It comes down to focusing on high value tasks, which means all of those things that are non-creative tasks, all the admin work, all of the invoicing, all that crap that like any human could do, or any system could set up and automate, all that stuff's got to go. Focus on the high value stuff. And then also setting boundaries with clients, where clients don't dictate your work hours, don't dictate when you do things. Obviously you want to keep a good relationship there. You don't want to be toxic or anything, but having boundaries in place to keep your toxic clients from overruling your boundaries, keeps you in a good, sane place, so that you can be maximum creative, right? Because we are paid for our creativity, so we've got to protect that at all costs. So that was just to number four, and that is you don't have to be the best, you just have to be the most visible. Think about that. You don't have to be the best at what you do, you just have to be the most visible. I've seen this countless times. Like in my over a decade of freelancing, plus just being in business in general for the last 15, 16 years now, I'm on my 16th year as an entrepreneur. I have not had a day job in over 16 years. January 2009 was my first year as a freelancer, or first month. I've seen time and time and time again, someone who is not considered the best getting the gig. So in my world, a producer who's not the best, they're good, but they're not the best. I've even seen cases where producers that are mediocre get the gig, not because that they're the best, but because they're more visible than the best option. Being good at your craft is a good starting place, but that's not it. It takes a lot more than that. There's a reason there's a sign behind me that says it takes more than passion. Passion is what leads us to getting good at our craft, but it takes way more than that. So many talented freelancers struggle, not because they're bad at their craft, but because they've neglected every other skill that goes into running a business. The day you've decided to charge for your services is the day you became a business owner. And as a business owner, all of a sudden, all these other responsibilities and roles just appear out of thin air. Sales, marketing, delegation, systems, processes, communication, all the things that we put into what we call, again, the full stack freelancer, which we have a series on the podcast called The Full Stack Freelancers, two episodes. Go back to episode 235 and 236