What To Do If 2024 Was A Freelancing Sh*tshow

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 341

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. It is the end of the year. And my question for you is this, how did it go? Was it steady? Were there ups and downs?

Were there maybe only downs? Maybe it was your best year ever? If it's best year ever, this is maybe not the episode for you, but if it's anything but the best year ever, this is probably the episode for you. Here's the reality for most freelancers. They start the month, they have no idea where their next client is coming from. Does that sound familiar? That also means that most freelancers start their year with no idea when or where or how they'll be getting their clients for that year. That should be terrifying if this year sucked for you. If that's how you've run your business for the past year, and that's your plan for next year, that should be terrifying for you. Now, I want you to imagine the opposite. Steady stream of high-value clients that are reaching out to work with you month after month. You know where those leads will be coming from. You know within a relatively small margin of error, how many of those leads will actually be coming in each month. And then you can reasonably project, again, within a small order of error, you can reasonably project your income for the month, every month. For most freelancers that I've talked to, that sort of consistency feels like some sort of impossible dream. But it is not. The truth is sitting around, waiting for referrals, or hoping that new leads land in your inbox, it is in no way, shape, or form a plan. It is just, I've called it a death trap before. It is a death trap. And it's one you've probably been in your entire career. I want to talk about why that trap keeps you stuck. And I want to talk about how shifting your mindset around client acquisition could change everything for this upcoming year. You see, I can talk about this from experience because I have been there. Back in January, 2014, I had one of those dream months where I made about $20,000, give or take. It was like $20,000, like $500 and something. And it felt awesome. Until February hit, the very next month, I brought in not $10,000, not $5,000, not $3,000. I brought in just over $1,200. I went from $20,000, over $20,000, to just over $1,200 in the span of a month. That roller coaster of feast or famine is what most freelancers just accept as normal. I want you to pay attention to this one point, because this is basically the entire point of this episode. The reason most people accept that feast or famine roller coaster is because the entire freelancing industry runs on the belief that referrals and word of mouth are all you've got. And that's 100% a lie. It's a lie born from our own insecurities of putting yourself out there or not wanting to look desperate. And it's a lie born mostly, honestly, mostly from the blind leading the blind. Most music producers, especially up and coming ones, just want to do what other successful music producers are doing. Most web designers just do what other web designers are doing. Most videographers are just doing what other videographers are doing. Most photographers, et cetera, et cetera. It's the same for every industry. But the truth is, if you need more clients and you're just waiting for referrals, you're just waiting around for things to magically appear, it is dumb. Just think about it. It is dumb. And I know you want to be so amazing that everyone sings the gospel of your services and how amazing you are, and you just have referrals and amazing people flooding in to work with you. But if that's not the truth of what's happening right now, then it is a dumb thing to be waiting around for that to happen. So you have two options. You can either become the best in your niche, the best in your market, the best in your area, the best of the best in your entire industry, or you can start taking client acquisition seriously. You can start to take marketing seriously. Think about this, what other industry relies entirely on hope and chance? Imagine a software company launches some brand new product, a SaaS company in other words, software as a service. I like comparing freelancers to software as a service because in a software as a service company, it is simply a service being performed by a software. And in a freelance world, it is a service being performed by a human. So there's a lot of similarities between the two business models. In a software as a service world, if they just launched a product, gathered funding from investors, built the product, launched the product, with absolutely no ads, no outreach, no promotion, no partners, no strategy, just thinking that, hey, we built an amazing product, people are gonna find it, and they're gonna refer so many people to us, and we're gonna just explode in growth. That company would eventually run out of money. They'd run out of money well before they ever reached a critical mass. And yet, this is the exact same strategy that freelancers use. And here's the biggest reason why the SaaS companies don't do that. It's because they have investors, and they have board members. And those people are very sophisticated, very smart. They're not going to let their company do dumb things. We're freelancers. It is just you. And I don't want to insult anyone here, but we all have our own blind spots. And so if we're doing some dumb, dumb things sometimes, it's because we're ignorant. Not because we're stupid. It's because we're ignorant. We don't know better. So if you wouldn't accept this sort of approach in any other industry, especially software as a service industry, why do you think freelancers accept this? I think it's partially because the problem is more painful and obvious if you're in a low-dollar, high-volume business model, something like software as a service where it's a small monthly charge, 10, 20, 30, $50 a month, online courses where you're selling courses for 100, 200, 500, $800. It's really painful in those business models when you don't get clients consistently. E-commerce is an even better example, probably the best example of this is the movie industry, where every single person is worth just a handful of dollars. And those movie producers need to make back hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars to recoup their investments in the movies. And so you see the biggest movie, the biggest blockbusters movies are advertised everywhere. But in high value, low volume businesses like freelancing and consulting, for that matter, you get a $5,000 client, you're on top of the world, you feel great, you start to fulfill the work, you're putting your passion into the project, you're going to blow your client away. At the end of the day, they're stoked, they love working with you, and they're going to refer some people to you, right? But you have no idea when, you have no idea where, you have no idea how, there's no predictability in this. So you just wait around for the next one. So what's the opposite of just waiting around? How can we look to the movie industry or the software as a service industry and take the best practices from those worlds and bring them to our small, freelance, humble businesses? We just have to build a system that puts you in control. That's it. We don't have to do a big commercial. We don't have to have our faces all over billboards. We don't have to do anything like that, but it's going to be something that you actually control, a process that allows you to find your ideal clients, bring them into your world, and convert them into high-value clients consistently. This isn't some sort of mystery. It is a solved problem. Every industry has solved this except for freelancers. And just like the software-as-a-service world, the product matters. You can throw millions of dollars behind marketing a terrible product, and it'll fall apart. It won't work, right? But even the best software products that are out there, they are not the biggest ones. Do you think HubSpot is the best CRM? No, they're just one of the best in the world at marketing their software-as-a-service company. Salesforce, do you think they're the best CRM? God, no. Those products are good enough, but they're great at marketing and selling those products. So the question is, do you want to make money, or do you want to be the best in the world? I think trying to be the best in the world is a loser's game because there's only one of those. There's only gonna be one all-time best web designer in the world, or even one all-time best web designer in your specific niche, for doctors or lawyers or whatever niche you fall into. There's only gonna be one best heavy metal music producer or indie pop producers, right? There's only gonna be one. And if you ain't first, you're last, as a mentor of mine once said. But if you don't figure this out, you're gonna stay stuck. Next year is gonna be as bad or worse than this year. But if you set this up, you don't know how many leads you're gonna get next month. You don't know how many clients that'll turn into for next month or the next couple months. And you don't know how much you're gonna earn over the next month or two. And the side benefit of this is because that predictability is coming, you know where your next clients are coming from, you have more ability to say no to those bad fit clients that you've been saying yes to because you needed the work, because you know you don't need it anymore. You can just say no to that $5,000 gig, that client that you know is gonna be an absolute pain to work with, that you shouldn't work with. There are toxic clients, but you need that money right now, so you gotta say yes. You can start saying no to those. And you can fall back in love with your work because you're working on better projects. Your business is predictable. It's stable. It's profitable. It's a real business. If this is the first time ever I listen to this podcast, hello, this is 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer, you want to make more money from your creative services. Maybe you want some stability and predictability in your business, but you want to do it without selling your soul. If that is you, you are in the right spot. I come to this episode not from someone who knows it all and is perfect. I have been right there. I've fallen into the same exact traps. In 2014, the $20,000 month down to the $1,200 month, I thought referrals were my only option. And so I'd wait and hope for emails and texts from my past clients to come hire me again or refer someone to me. When I had a good month, I'd feel unstoppable. When I had a bad month, I would question everything. I would doubt myself. Again, I get this. But at the root of it, it was not my talent. It was not my pricing. It was just my lack of control over how clients came into my business. That was it. And my turning point for this was 2015 I stumbled into the world of digital marketing when I launched my first course. Remember how I said, you only do what you see out there, right? In 2014, I was still only following other producers, seeing what other people in my industry was doing. I had no outside influence. I was what I called an inbred business, where there's no diversity in our gene pools, essentially. Just end with the other music producers out there. And so our businesses were very same same. But when I branched out and did my first digital product, in the heavy metal mixing world, I launched a course called From S*** to Gold. It was my very first course. I had to learn how digital marketing worked in order to launch and promote this course. And I didn't know what I was doing at first. I tried some content. I tried some ads. Nothing really was perfect. Nothing worked great. But even the small wins changed how I thought, which is a big deal for me. I didn't know it at the time, but now looking back, that was a big deal. By 2016, I was all in. I started learning from the SaaS world. That's where I started becoming obsessive about how software as a service companies market and sell those businesses. I started diving into lead generation, figuring out how to adapt those lessons into my freelancing business. And the shift in mindset is what paved the way for me to scale my freelance recording studio to multiple six figures with consistent months instead of these massive up and down months.