Why Perfectionism Is Killing Your Income—The $92/hr vs. $462/hr Problem

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 354

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. Creatives love to make things perfect. We literally get into this because we like making things, we like crafting things, we like designing things, we like producing things, whatever it is that we do for a living, we love to do that thing, right? But the problem with that is we want to perfect everything that we do because as creatives, we want everything we do to be perfect. That's just how we operate, right? But in this episode, I want to make the argument that we should be spending more of our effort on being efficient versus being perfect. And here's why. Freelancers end up spending their time perfecting every little tiny piece of the project instead of actually just getting it done to the client specifications, what the client actually wants. And what the client wants is actually what really matters more than what we want as creatives. So when we start perfecting things and spending time perfecting and over-perfecting and overdoing and redoing and undoing and redoing again and again and again, you end up spending too much time fulfilling on what you're paid to do. And when you're spending too much time fulfilling on what you're paid to do, you have to raise your rates to compensate yourself for that time. And when we raise our rates to compensate for that time, we end up losing out on gigs to other freelancers who can work more efficiently, thus get the gig because they can charge less, or we end up making less per hour on the project if we did win the project, because we're spending too many hours on the project, way more hours than we should be spending on the project. And so bottom line, you end up either just losing the project out rate, or you end up tanking your dollars per hour, how much you earn per hour, or maybe money per hour is a better way of doing this. So let me give you an example of something that I came across recently. I recently audited a client's time sheet. This is where they basically go through and they put all of their times in and what it takes them to do a service or fulfill on a project. And I was looking at this client, and their estimate for a project was $3,700, and the time spent on the project was 40 hours. And if you're doing quick math in your head, that's $92.50 an hour. The problem is that I fulfilled on the exact same service and the exact same niche for all of that in about eight hours. The exact same thing, eight hours time. And so at 92.5 an hour, that means I don't have to charge $740 for the exact same project. I don't have to charge $740. That's five times less. So in this scenario, who's going to get the gig? If we're the same quality, I'm going to get the gig. If I'm better than this person, I'm going to get the gig 100% of the time. If I'm even slightly worse, I might still get the gig because am I five times worse? Is five times the price that he's charging worth what he's giving? Is it five times better? Some people might say yes. Many people will say no, and they'll hire me because I'm almost as good for five times less than he's charging. So in most cases, I'm obviously going to get the gig in this scenario, right? Because I'm able to fulfill more efficiently, do the same or better quality in eight hours than he's doing in 40 hours. I'll likely get the gig. But let's look at the profit side of this. This is another part that freelancers don't think about. If we're similar quality, or even maybe I'm slightly better, and I still charge the same $3,700 than he's charging for his 40-hour project, but I take eight hours to fulfill on that, I make $462.50 an hour. So if we charge the same, and I'm just more efficient, I get $460 an hour. And that's not far off from what I was actually getting per hour in my decade of freelancing. I was averaging over $350 an hour. So this episode, I just want to break down, have a good rant, some tactical things, some takeaways on just being more efficient, killing your damn perfectionism, focusing on results. Let you finish faster, win more gigs, because you're able to charge more competitively, maybe slightly less than some people. That's what I did. I charged slightly less, gave more value, and I still earned more per hour than those people did. Or you'll just be able to earn more per hour because you offer similar quality in half the time. So this is your first time ever listening to the podcast. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls. Take a lot of influence from a lot of different industries, a lot of different types of freelancers, and a lot of different people in completely different industries like SaaS. Love the SaaS world. Best practices from those worlds and bring them to what we're doing here. And efficiency is one of those things, honestly, that a lot of other industries focus on, especially the manufacturing industry. That's where the theory of constraints come from, which I love. And I talk about this all the time in the podcast. I'm not going to talk about it right now. But my belief is if we take influence from all these other industries and all these other types of freelancers out there, then we can make our businesses better. So let's get into this. One of my differentiators has always been efficiency. It's a rare creative trait to really focus on efficiency. But I think it comes down to more of a form of laziness. There's a quote, I'm going to paraphrase it because I'm going to butcher this, but it's something like, if you want to find the most efficient way of doing something, give the tasks to a lazy person. I don't know how true that is, and maybe the lazy person would cut too many corners. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of truth to that. A lazy person is going to just say, I don't really want to do this, so what's the easiest way to do it? Now, obviously we don't want to approach our businesses this way. We don't want to have that attitude with this. But there is some truth to just being a person who's always spotting inefficiencies in what they do. Anytime I look at how I do something or how someone else does something, I spot all the different ways that that person is being so inefficient with their time, with things as simple as just like basic hot keys or shortcuts on their keyboard, to like even what software they're using. So, for example, if you're a Chrome user, which you should be in most cases, there's also Arc, which I try, I don't love. If you're a Chrome user, which most people are, everyone knows, you know, hit Command T to open up a tab, hit Command W or Control W if you're Windows, Command W to close a tab on the browser. Everyone knows those. But did you know about Command Shift T?