Why Your “Dream Clients” Aren’t Hiring You (And How to Fix It)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 375

Welcome to the Six 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. Think about your dream client right now, the type of project it would be, how fun it might be, the budget they might have, all that juicy, juicy budget, the clout you could get by working with a dream client, the long-term potential. What could it do for your portfolio or for your entire career? You probably thought about this before. You probably dreamed about it. You probably fantasized about it. But if you ever stopped to ask yourself, are you actually attractive to that sort of dream client? Most freelancers never think about that. And it's the reason they struggle to ever land those dream clients. So today I'm going to show you the four big things that make you the perfect fit for your dream client so you can marry each other. What spurred this episode was I came across a document that I made years and years ago called My Future Wife. It's an Evernote file I made. And in this document, I just brain dumped a bullet point list of all the things that I wanted my future wife, my dream wife, right? And I made that back in like 2011, I think is when I made that list. But after sitting with it for a while, I realized I wasn't the type of guy who was going to be attractive to that type of woman. So I spent the next four or five years developing myself in many different ways so that I would be attractive when I met, eventually, who is now my wife, that perfect fit person for me, the dream wife, in other words. Many freelancers, I'd say most freelancers, never take that same objective look at themselves to see if they're even attractive to the types of clients that they want to work with, the dream clients, the ones they want to marry. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast made for creative freelancers who are selling their skills and want to make more money without selling their souls. If that's you, you're in the right spot. This is a podcast where I bring my diverse skill set, my long-standing background as an entrepreneur. I haven't had a day job since 2008, I think is the last time I had a day job, the last time I was employed by somebody. And we also have a team of 11 amazing entrepreneurs and marketers and people who understand digital marketing, client acquisition, sales, all these sorts of things, who can all bring their skill set to this show as well. So lots of cool perspectives to bring to you so that you can say, hey, that will work well in my business, or maybe that won't work well in my business, but maybe I can adapt it a small way to make that actually work in my business. That's what this podcast is for. So let's dive into the four things you need to be the perfect fit for your dream client. Again, going back to that stupid list I made in 2011 when I was like, perpetually single. I had literally been single for probably like six years at the time when I made that list. And again, it was this funny realization that I was not the type of person that was gonna be attractive to this. I just see this so many times with the clients we work with. They have these lofty aspirations of this is who I want to work with. This is who I'm targeting. These big businesses, if you're in B2B, these big, big artists, if you're in a music production space, and you realize you're not the type of freelancer who's gonna be attractive to that sort of client. And it's for these reasons that I'm about to cover in this episode. So number one, I'm gonna cover something I call the softs, S-O-F-T-S, the softs. And I wanna talk about two specific things when it comes to the softs as a freelancer. Likeability, because this is a huge one, I'm gonna define what that means, but likeability is something that cannot be overestimated when it comes to success for a freelancer. I've seen freelancers who have the entire package, they're amazing at what they do, but they're just not likeable people and they struggle because of it because generally, as a freelancer, when you're working close with clients, they want to work with somebody they actually like. And there's the phrase in marketing, people want to work with people they know, like and trust. Well, like is a big part of that, and likeability is a bunch of little things that all add up to one thing. I'll talk about that in a second. And the second area I want to talk about when it comes to the softs is mental stability. This is something that, again, if you are mentally unstable as a freelancer, it's going to show up in how you work with your clients, how you work with your projects, how you work with other people, any people you collaborate with in projects, and that's going to greatly affect how people perceive you. So we're going to talk about both of these things when it comes to the softs. If you're wondering what I mean by the softs, I'm just talking about soft skills, and I may not be getting the perfect definition of what soft skills are, but soft skills are just personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. I think that's what this category would be, the softs. Let's talk about likability. How likable are you as a human being? When I think of somebody who's likable, one of the people that stand out in my mind and more than anyone else I've probably ever met is a guy named Billy Decker.