Why You Should Ask Your Clients For Feedback After Every Single Project | The Infinite Clients Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 299

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.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time ever listening to the show, first of all, hello, so glad you're happy here. This podcast might be for you, might not be for you, but it is for you if you are a freelancer who offers creative services, and you want to make more money from those creative skills without selling your soul. That sounds like you. You might be in the right place. We'll find out. For my returning or longtime listeners, or maybe old who just came back, we are wrapping up the final episode of a long ass series. It's like eight episode series called the Infinite Clients Series. And I'll explain it again just for anyone who's new. The concept of this series is what if we had such an amazing service with such an amazing experience, every single one of our clients referred another client to us.

Not only that, they referred another client to us and they kept coming back to us. Or if it's a recurring retainer kind of service that you offer, they just never cancel. If that were the case, where every single client came back to you again and again and again, never cheating on you with another service provider, and every single client referred a new client to you, you essentially have infinite clients. You will always grow every single year. So very hard thing to do, but something that if we could get it, who doesn't want that, right? A lot of times we talk a lot about marketing, which is wonderful, client acquisition. These skills are wonderful to have. It's something that we, most of us will always need to some degree, because sometimes clients stop coming back to us. They're no fault of our own. Sometimes clients don't refer other people to us. They're no fault of our own. So it is an impossible goal to work towards, but it's not something that we should ever stop striving towards. And this episode is for you. If you've gone through this whole series and you've implemented all the shit that we've talked about in this series, all these wonderful, cool things that we've done in each of the episodes, like setting up a rock-solid eight-part client agreement or setting up the perfect five-step client onboarding process or following those six bare minimum rules for solid client communication. We're building that external brain that helps you get everything out of your brain into an external brain, AKA project management system. Maybe listen to Michael Janda's episode where he talks about being a more likable person and you've been working on that because those are skills that need to be exercised. Or maybe you just came from last week's episode where we talked about client boundaries. Whatever it was, whatever episode you've listened to and implemented, think of this episode as the final step to tie it all together because you don't just implement things and then move on with your life.

You've got to actually see, how do we know if we actually did things any better? How do we know if we're actually improving? How do we keep getting better week after week, month after month, year after year?

If you're like most freelancers, when you finish a project with a client, you just say, thanks, goodbye. Thanks for your money. Hope you got what you wanted. Goodbye. You might ask for a referral if you're a little more sophisticated, but I can almost guarantee that you do not ask for feedback from your clients.

Either because you just don't know to or because you're scared of what they might really say. It might be both. Now that you know you should ask for feedback, you may still be scared to do it. But because of this, because you're not gathering feedback from clients, and it doesn't sound sexy, it doesn't sound exciting, I promise you by the end of this episode, you will have changed your mind, but because you're not getting feedback from your clients, a couple of things can happen. First is wounds can fester, meaning if you have something that happened with a client where they're wounded in some way, whether they're unhappy with something or you said something that kind of irked them or whatever, those things can fester and turn into horrible, toxic relationships down the road. And you didn't know there was even anything wrong in the first place because you never asked for feedback. And so that wound just festered, and they probably didn't come back to you. They probably didn't refer people to you. And you had no chance to fix it or make it right because you had no idea it was going on in the first place. The other issue, problems in your business linger. Nothing really gets fixed. You might have implemented a new onboarding process.