Why All Those Half-built Bridges Are Killing Your Business | The Dangers Of Dabbling

Brian Hood (0:00)

A quick announcement, and then we'll get back to your episode that you're listening to. We just opened up our fall enrollment for Clients by Design Coaching. There are 14 spots available as the time that I record this. Applications are open from October 24th through October 31st. And if you decide to join this cohort, here's what we're gonna do together. We're gonna work with you one-on-one to build out all the missing pieces of your client acquisition machine, fix all the pieces of those half-built bridges, those ideas that you dabbled in and never finished, give you all the help and support and community you need to make the most for the rest of 2024, and then make 2025 your best year ever, specifically in two ways. The first is growth, making sure you're actually growing in 2025 and not plateaued or even shrinking. And then the second way is consistency, making sure it's not this up-and-down feast or famine stress fest. It's actually consistency, month-to-month-to-month-to-month. If you wanna be a part of this fall enrollment cohort, you have until October 31st to apply, or until we fill up those remaining 14 spots. So just go to 6fingercreative.com/fall, fill out the application there. We'll look it over, see if you might be a good fit for this, and let you know. Again, that's 6fingercreative.com/fall.

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 334

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.

Podcasts are some of my favorite things in the world. I listen to dozens of different podcasts. I have a podcast with hundreds of episodes, and podcasts can be incredible. They can also be terrible for freelancers. And I want to take this episode to talk over why. Now, on one side, we've got client acquisition series. If you're a freelancer, that's probably helpful for you. We've got the Legion series. We've got the sales series. We've got the differentiation series. We've got 10 plus episodes about pricing. And who knows what else in the 333 other episodes of the podcast, since this is 334 We have a lot of content out there, right? So it sounds amazing on the surface, and it kind of is, but it also, there's a downfall on the other side of that. And this is the downfall for so many of you right now, listening to the show. I hate to say this. This is gonna hurt my download numbers. And I've said this before on the podcast, but you see this amazing sea of advice out there, the advice buffet for the 6 Figure Creative. And then you see the advice buffet for the Chris Does of the world and all the content he puts out there that's amazing. And you see the advice buffet for Grow Your Video Podcast, Ryan Coral, his show's amazing as well. And then you see the advice buffet for Alex Hermosy and all the incredible stuff he puts out, almost all that I listen to. And so now not only do you have just this show, you have all these other shows out there and all the other YouTubers that you probably follow as well, telling you different things that you should do in your business or in your life or in your creative pursuits. And what that creates is this dissonance, this horrible dissonance in your brain. I've seen this again and again and again and again and again. This dissonance is there's a billion things I should be doing, I have no idea where to start. Or even worse, in a lot of cases, there's a billion things I should be doing, I'm gonna do all of them. And so you end up doing like 10 different things, dabbling in 10 different things at a time. And then you end up with 10 different half-built bridges to absolutely nowhere. So not only is this a slower way to actually fix the problems in your business, because you're context switching between 10 different things at any given time, you rarely actually finish anything. That's what a half-built bridge is. You start it, you never finish it. Or you finish it, you never do anything with it. And the things you do finish and actually do something with, you don't even sustain it long term. You just cast it aside to move on to the next thing. And I want to challenge you to think about what is the last thing you implemented from this podcast or really any other podcast that you listened to? What did you do? How long did it take you to do it? What were the results of that thing? Did you actually keep it up after the fact, once you actually completed it or did it? Did you keep up long term if it was like a thing that needed to be done more than one time? A good example of this was we had an episode not too long ago about creating lead magnets as freelancers. Building an email list as a freelancer is an amazing resource to have for many reasons. And so we had a whole episode on lead magnets that actually work for freelancers. I would link you to it, but that's just going to do exactly what I don't want you to do, which is, oh, there's another shiny object to work on. So this episode, by the way, is going to have no links to anything else in it. This is going to be a weird episode. The show notes page will have no links to other episodes because I don't want you to say, oh, that's something I need. Oh, that's something I need. I'm going to add that to my 10 list of things to do. But we had an episode about lead magnets. I'm using this as an example. Many people listen to the episode and said, oh, I need a lead magnet. And then they half built a lead magnet. Many more people took the time, time and effort energy into creating a lead magnet, but then they never released it. It's just sitting around on their hard drive somewhere. And then even fewer people, but a lot of people built it, released it, got a little influx of new leads coming in, felt good, but they never continuously promoted it. It was just a one and done thing. That is so much wasted effort, so much wasted energy, so much wasted potential on these, again, half built bridges. So today, I don't want to talk about 30 more things you need to do right now. I want to talk about the one thing you need to do right now. And that is this, create a plan that you trust, and then follow it until it's done. That's it. Create a plan you can trust, and then follow it until it's done. Put your head down, tune everything else out, including this podcast, and just follow the plan. You will actually finish what you started if you do it this way. You'll move further, faster, and you'll actually get the change that you came to this podcast for. You listen to the show because you want to make more money from your creative skills without selling yourself. That's the whole gist of the show. So we all generally want the same thing, but there's one or more things holding us back from that goal that we have for ourselves. So if you put your head down and actually follow a plan, you will see more results, even if that means you have to stop listening to the show for a while. And that bumps me out to say, but it's the truth. So if this is your first time ever listening to the show, this is a weird one to start on. But this is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. This show is for creative freelancers who want to make more money from their creative services without selling their soul. If that sounds like you, you're on the right podcast. Maybe a weird episode for you. Maybe go poke around some other episodes first and then come back to this one. But it is the end of the year right now. It's Q4. For those of you who think it's in quarters, that's a very business way to think, but that's just kind of how I've grown in my brain. It's the last one fourth of the year, is the easier way to say it. The last three months of the year right now. So you basically have like two months and a week left at this point. I want you to end this year strong. I want you to set yourself up to succeed in 2025 And the whole gist of this episode that I want to talk you through is setting up a plan for yourself. The whole gist of this came from a conversation we had with a potential client. This guy had a family of five, so three kids, wife and himself. I think he might have been the sole earner. I don't know exactly, but that means that there's just a lot of pressure on him to actually succeed as a freelancer. He had been dabbling for the past few years. He's been listening to this show, or at least watching us on YouTube for the last year and a half, off and on. Many of you can probably relate to this. He was making 50 to 60K a year, something like that. And almost all of it, at least the last few months, was coming from one well client, as a contractor. If you listen back to the episode I talked about where contracting is for suckers, this was the classic example where it's one sole source of income, paying you as a contractor, a pretty decent amount of money to make 4 or 5K a month as a contractor, is not a terrible thing. And that episode actually referenced somebody was making 20K a month from Dropbox as a contractor. And I talked through all the reasons that was actually a bad thing. Not saying you should turn down 20K, but just saying the gist of the episode is, as a contractor, you have all of the downsides of a day job, you still have a boss, one source of income, you still have to work within their systems, how they do things, and then you get none of the upsides of a day job. You don't have the job security. They can fire you, replace you at any point. You don't get any benefits. There's nothing on that side that you get. It's a horrible position to be in, especially when you're a family of five. And he was the classic dabbler. He was trying all these little things here and there, halfway completing all of them, doing nothing to change the circumstance, just coasting along with the one whale client, paying him as a contractor. In the last two months, he had had no real freelance projects, just the contract gig. And because of this, and because of obviously having to pay for his life and his family and stuff, he couldn't afford our help. And so left the conversation just saying, I hope I can save money so that I can afford your help. And that's a terrible position to be in. And I want to help this person, but we are not a charity or a for-profit company, just like you are as a freelancer. I don't expect you to work for your clients for free, just like I wouldn't expect my employees to work for me for free. Hey, we've got this person who really needs our help but can't afford us. I'm sorry, but we've got a long line of people who can't afford our help and do need our services, just like you should have a long line of people who need your help and need your services and are willing to pay for it. If you want to do charity, take your earnings from your business and put it into a charity of some sort that's actually using the funds in a meaningful way. But I digress. The reason I'm bringing this story up is because many people come to us in a similar position where the transgressions of their past led them to a point where we're having a conversation about fixing the problem that they need fixed. But because they're in this situation in the first place, they cannot afford help. And so they are then on their own to go back and try to fix the problem that got them in this place in the first place, and they're unable to solve the problem. And we've seen this, we follow up months later, a year later, same exact position or worse. And I don't want that for you. So this episode, I want to talk through creating what I call an MVP, a Minimum Viable Plan to fix your situation so you can get out of whatever terrible cycle you might be in, or even just, you're doing great and you want to do better. Whatever your situation is, I want to help you get out of that with this episode. And this is the simplest, most minimal, straightforward plan that you can create. It is literally two steps. The plan is two steps. The execution is much more than that. The plan is this, find your one constraint. What is the one thing constraining your business right now? Alex Ramosi calls this the theory of constraints. And that theory of constraints is your business will grow to the level of that constraint and will not get past that. And if you alleviate that one constraint, the business will grow until the next constraint is hit. And so in freelance world, there's usually two constraints that hold you back. I'll talk through all the different constraints that it could be, but there's usually two constraints. Constraint number one is a lead generation issue. That's like the most common one. You have no new leads every month. Therefore, you have no clients every month. It is the most simple one to fix. It's the one that we see day in and day out that we fix all day every day. Most common. But once you fix that issue and you start to gain clients and you get enough clients and your roster fills up, then you hit a time constraint. And that is where I can't take on more clients. My roster is full. And therefore, my business is stuck. And until I alleviate the constraint of time, then I cannot grow my business any further. So those are the two main constraints, but I want to talk through all of the different constraints there could be in kind of a logical order. Because one of these things is holding your business back right now. And everyone listening to the show, if you're still listening for whatever reason, because I feel like this is almost a doom and gloom episode, but these are necessary sometimes. This is like tough love Brian coming out. I would bet that 99% of people have one of these four constraints I'm going to talk about. There's monthly leads. Do you have a constraint around the amount of new leads you're bringing in every month? Constraint number two is monthly sales. Are you consistently turning those leads into clients at a high percentage? Constraint number three is, are your clients worth enough? Just because they're closing clients doesn't mean they're actually worth an amount that can sustain your business. And constraint number four is slow fulfillment. Are you actually wasting time being a perfectionist? Time you could be better spent fixing these other problems in your business? Or delivering the results faster? Remember, your clients don't pay for perfection. They pay for results. They pay for outcomes. Usually one of those four constraints, if alleviated, will grow your business to the next level, whatever that level is, to the next constraint. So either you don't have leads coming in every month. You do have leads coming in every month, but you can't turn them into clients. You do have clients every month, but they're not at a high enough level to sustain your business. Or you do have leads. You do have clients. They are high value, but you spend too long fulfilling on the services. Which one of those four is it? What is the one thing that, if you fix it, will grow your business? When you find that constraint, there is no shortage of episodes on this podcast to fix any of those things. If you can just find that one constraint and spend the next one to three months, spend the rest of this year fixing that one constraint, you'll see your business grow. Alex Hermosy, again, I swear to God, I quote this guy too much. I need to find more content out there, but his stuff's so good. I'm sorry. And if you hate Alex, apologies. I'll try to deliver it in a way that doesn't trigger you in whatever way Alex Hermosy might trigger you. I don't know why he would, but he's not for everybody, I guess. But he just knows business and business models better than anyone that I've seen. But Alex says, if your business is struggling, spend the first four hours of your day, every day fixing that one constraint and nothing else. This sounds very aggressive. You may not need to spend that many hours on it, and it may not take that long. It may not take one to three months to fix it. For example, maybe you just got to raise your rates. I have a whole rant on that somewhere. I'm going to scream at you for like three minutes telling you to raise your rates on this podcast. Someone can reference that somewhere. But that takes five minutes and a lot of courage. The reason I bring up Alex and Mozi is he makes a really good point. If there is one constraint in your business that you know if you fix it will give you a raise in your business, why wouldn't you spend four hours a day on it? The only excuse you have is if you have other priorities in your life, family, kids, you're making good money in your business and the time constraint is actually preventing you from having four hours to spend on this, one of those things, and you're not willing to make the trade-off. That's it. Like you're just not willing to make the trade-off. And that's okay as well. Not everyone is willing to pay the price to get where they want to go, or you may not be willing to pay the price to get there faster. I make the decision myself, I don't work more than eight hours a day. I work nine to five basically. Sometimes I get started a little earlier, around eight, eight thirty. I'm off by four or five every day. I don't work weekends. So could I move faster if I was working 12 hours a day, or more like Alex Mosey does? I could definitely get faster. I could definitely get further. But would I like my quality of life? Maybe not. What I choose to do is make consistent progress over a long period of time. I have a lot of responsibilities in my businesses right now. A lot of different things pull me in a lot of different directions. I know what our one constraint is, and I work towards it multiple, multiple times per week. I have a plan. I have my marching orders from Alex Hermosy himself sent down from the heavens of the 10 commandments of Moses himself. Mr. Alex Noah Hermosy, his commandments, his marching orders for me from back in August. Still working on those. I have until about December 15th to finish those when I go back to Vegas. And I've made a lot of progress on those. But many of you know what to do in your business. You know what's wrong, you know how to fix it. You just haven't put your head down to fix a thing because you keep hearing new ideas and new things coming at you from my show, from other shows, from YouTube, different resources. And it pulls you away from whatever rough idea you have in your head of what you should be fixing. And so the reason so many freelancers fail to make the progress that they want to make in their business is because they either fail to make a plan, and we can just go to that generic ass quote, if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Sure. That's why so many people fail. They just don't have any sort of plan. They're falling whatsoever. So stop, listen, think about what is your constraint and put a plan together of some sort. Usually one to three steps of things to fix. The other reason people fail so much is because they can't create a plan that they actually trust. And in my outline here, I have the word trust underlined, right? If you lose trust in the plan that you were following, you will stop following it. The plan is simple. And you lose trust in that plan when you lack the confidence that it will actually accomplish what you want it to accomplish. So if you're not confident that you can actually create a plan to fix the constraint in your business, or for worst case, you don't even know what your constraint is, you kind of have three options here. You have option one, which is do nothing, which is, for lack of a better thing, is basically what so many people that I've talked to about us helping them are going to do. They've done nothing, they talk, decide I'm gonna keep doing the same thing that I'm doing now, which isn't working, and then move forward to continue doing what they're doing. That is a great way to coast your life, not getting what you want. Option two is to create a plan that you won't trust, try to follow it, likely give up before you actually fix any of the problems you do want to fix. And it may take you a couple of those starts before you realize that there is a third option. Now, the third option is get someone to help you create the plan that you actually trust. This is what I did with Alex Shamozzi. I paid him an absurd amount of money for me to fly out to Vegas to spend even more money on flights and hotels and food and Ubers to spend a day with him, for him to look at my business and tell me what was wrong with it and give me marching orders to go off and work on my own. He's not helping me implement it. He's just, here's what you gotta fix, and I will go off and fix those things. And when you look at these three options, option one's garbage. It's a completely garbage option. It is the loser's path. If what you're doing right now is not working and you decide to keep doing that, you are saying, I want to continue to fail. If what you're doing right now is working and you want to keep doing that thing, that's fine. I don't even know why you'd be listening to this episode here. But option one for most people is garbage if where you're at right now isn't where you wanna be. Option two's still better than option one, but not great if you haven't proven to yourself that you can trust yourself. Many people haven't built that trust muscle yet. People that have not built up those small wins into bigger and bigger wins so that you can say to yourself, I have a proven track record of success so that when I plan something, when I commit to something, when I say that I will do something, I'll actually do it, that's a very tough thing for people to build up. It's a superpower I didn't realize I had until I started working with hundreds of people at this point, is that many people don't have that basic confidence in themselves that when they say they'll do something, they'll actually accomplish it. Option three is great, but it depends on who is helping you. If you're going to your cousin down the road who has a bakery, a business not at all related to what you do, or this is just someone you can't trust to actually fix the constraint in your business, identify the constraint and fix it, then it's not a great option. But if you have an Alex Hemos in your life, go pay them whatever they say, right? If you want our help, we're actually in the middle of our fall enrollment period for Clients by Design. You may have seen some of the emails from us. If not, then you're not on our email list. That's fine. But we're in the middle of it right now. We were at 15 spots when we started this process last week of enrolling for the fall enrollment period. So this is Tuesday now. We opened up fall enrollment, I think, last Thursday. So I'm assuming there's less than 15 spots now. I don't know what the exact number is because it's October 16th right now when I record this. But assuming there are spots left in our fall enrollment period, and you want our help, here's what we'll do with you. We will work with you to create a plan that does more than even what I talked about on this episode. Identify your constraint, put a full plan together, usually four or five different phases of things to solve, knowing once we solve this, we know what the next constraint will be. Because we've worked with hundreds of freelancers at this point, so we have seen inside the businesses of many, many people. So we will create a plan that is including all the things that you're not doing right now in your business that you should be doing, which is the reason you're not where you want to be. And then we will actually help you execute that plan. Unlike Alex Tormozi, I'm gonna throw Alex under the bus, who I paid a bunch of money, and he's like, here's your plan. Here's your 10 commandments. Go follow them to the best of your ability. I'll see you in December. Unlike that, we will actually help you every day, five days a week at least, to execute every single step in that plan so that you actually do things the right way and you don't come back three months later and say, I've done it all. And we're like, no, that's actually terrible. You did it all wrong. And then the third thing we'll do is actually hold you accountable to finish the plan. Again, if you haven't built that trust muscle up with yourself, where when you say you'll do something, you don't actually do it. When you said you would eat healthy, you stopped eating healthy. When you said you work out, you didn't go to the gym. When you said you wake up at 5.30, you snooze the alarm 20 times. If that's kind of how you operate right now, then you need accountability in your life. So we hold you accountable by actually following up, following through, making sure you're doing the work, doing it in very short cycles, where we're in touch with you almost every day, to the point where we know when you have gone missing. I think the biggest reason people follow through with what they say they're gonna do is because they know no one's watching. They know that if they stop doing it, no one's gonna care, no one's gonna even miss it, right? If you don't show up to your Planet Fitness, do you think Planet Fitness gives a damn? No, they actually bank on the fact that you're not gonna be there. Their business model is predicated on the fact that 90% of people who pay for a Planet Fitness membership will not show up. That's not how we operate. So if you're interested in getting this level of attention and help on fixing the constraints of your business, go to 6figurecreative.com/fall.