What Are You Willing to Give Up to Grow Your Freelance Business?

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 383
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. What do you think the number one thing is that gets in the way of progress for anyone I've ever worked with helping them with their business? If you guessed, a lack of time, you'd be right. The problem with this is, it is almost always an excuse. There's some rare cases where it's not an excuse, but this is almost always an excuse. And I can tell you this because I've seen this across a large demographic of people at this point, hundreds of people that we've worked with and that we've helped. And we've seen people in situations where they have lots of responsibilities. They have a family, they have a full-time job, or they have a very demanding business with lots and lots of clients, lots of projects, maybe even doing community roles, or they're taking care of extended family. And yet, those people I've seen time and time again still make progress in their business. The people who have the most excuses for a lack of time, don't let lack of time hold them back. I'll flip this to the other extreme. This is what I see a lot of. It's people who have no real reasons that would hold them back. I've seen everything from just simple like, hey, you're a freelancer, this is your full-time thing. There should be no real things holding you back. You're single, you're unmarried, you don't have kids. There's really nothing holding you back there. But I've seen the complete extreme of a case where we had somebody come in, they had just been let go of their job, they had no family, they had no clients, they were starting from scratch, they had literally absolutely zero reason to have time as a complaint or an excuse as to why they weren't making progress, and yet that was their excuse, that was their problem. They were not making progress constantly, over and over again, because a quote, lack of time. Now the reality is most people kind of live in between one of those two extremes. Most people don't have all the responsibilities that some people have. They don't have the extended family they're taking care of, or health issues they're dealing with, or a large family, or a full-time job. And also, not everyone just has, like, seemingly all the time in the world. So you're probably somewhere in the middle. You might have a wife or a husband. You might have one or two kids. Maybe you do have some of the things that should hold you back. Or maybe you just have no major responsibilities, but everybody has stuff to do, right? But at the end of the day, we all have the same 24 hours. So why is it some people can get way more done in those 24 hours than other people? Why is it some people seemingly with everything holding them back can still make progress, while some people who have literally the sky's limit of what they could do with their time still can't make progress? Well, there are two levers for progress. The one is prioritization, which I'm going to talk about in another episode. This is basically saying, am I actually working on the right things? This can be a huge problem for some people, which is why I'm going to have a whole episode on it. Probably the next episode, if everything goes as planned. But the other lever, and the thing I want to talk about in this episode, is just simply trade-offs.
I.e. what are you willing to give up in the short term to gain what you want in the long term? And this one's really tough for a lot of people, including myself, sometimes, in some seasons. But the reality is, we have to make time for the things that we care about. You can say that you want to grow your freelance business, but your actions actually show that. If you look at just other areas in life, there's many people who say they'd love to be something. They'd say, I'd love to be Jack, or I'd love to be fit, or I'd love to be a millionaire, or I'd love to be good at whatever. I'd love to be good at pottery, I'd love to be good at video games, I'd love to be good at your craft, mixing music, mastering music, producing songs, building beautiful websites that also convert people, strangers into customers. It isn't just a flashy looking website. You can say you want to be good at those things or even great at those things, but very few people are willing to do what it takes to actually get there. Myself included, there's many things in my life that I would love to be or love to do, but I just accept the fact that I am not willing to do what it takes to get those things. I'm not willing to make the sacrifices, I'm not willing to put in the hard work that it takes to be a scratch golfer. Like I love golf, but the lowest my handicap has ever been is like a six. I will probably not get much below that in this season of life right now because I just don't have what it takes from a time perspective, from an emotional perspective, I get too mad, et cetera, et cetera. So I just accept I'm not really cut out for this. And sometimes you have to have that honest conversation with yourself to ask yourself, are you really even cut out for this? For some people in some things, the answer is no, and that's okay. For some of you, freelancing may not be the thing that you were meant to do. And if that's the case, just accept it and don't waste your time, effort, energy, put yourself into debt, wasting time and effort trying to make it work when you really shouldn't be. But for everyone else, where freelancing is for you, and you do want to break through a plateau or stop that yearly decline in your income that you're dealing with, or you want to start getting higher quality clients, or you just want to make more money, the question I have for you is, what are you willing to give up? Now, if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creative freelancers who are trying to make more money from their creative skills. And you wouldn't do it without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. And one of the ways that we have to consider making more money is by properly investing our time that we have the same 24 hours every day into what we do. And in another episode, probably the next episode, we're going to talk about prioritization. So you're actually working on the right things and investing those hours wisely. But in this episode, I'm going to talk about the things that are actually pulling you away. It's like the junk food of our time. So let's talk about some of the common trade-off categories that we can look at and say, what am I willing to give up some of or all of for a season in order to get what I want out of my freelance business, or whatever it is you're working on. This really could pertain to anything. But we're talking about building your freelance business, client acquisition, or building systems out for smoother, better process, building your onboarding process, your offboarding process, whatever it is that you're working on, actually having the time to do so without making the excuse that, oh, I just don't have time to do that. The first category, and this is probably the biggest one for most people, is entertainment. If you honestly add up the amount of hours you spend on Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, video games, Instagram, whatever social media app is your poison, it's a startling number. My personal vice is YouTube. I will spend hours on YouTube. That is my downtime. That's my lunchtime. I don't watch Netflix. I do play video games sometimes. That's another one that I'll do sometimes. I'll talk about how I balance it later on.