Why You’re Stuck On The Feast Or Famine Roller Coaster (And How To Get Off)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 333

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. Happy October, fall is in full swing. I am now in hoodie weather. I'm so happy for this. Yesterday in Nashville was what I call happy first breath day. It's like the first day of the year that we were able to see our breath when I came outside in the morning to go to the gym. Or actually, it was after coming to the gym where the sun was actually out. My wife has completely redecorated her house, so we have all fall decor everywhere. And my wife came from a family who redecorates four times a year for all four seasons. They redecorate the house completely different. And if you follow me on social and Instagram for a while, you've seen my yearly Christmas tour update of their insanely elaborate Christmas decor stuff. We're not gonna get to that level, but yeah, October's here. I'm gonna hoodie. If I'm gonna hoodie, I'm happy. Happy Brian is Hoodie Brian. Today, I want to talk about how to stop these wild swings in monthly income that most freelancers experience at some point. This will be a bit of a tough love episode, especially for you freelancers who are really successful and follow this kind of client acquisition model that 95% of people that I talk to follow. Unless you've been listening to the show for a while, especially if you're new, you probably follow this model of getting clients. Here's how it goes. You work with clients. Those clients refer more clients to you. You work with those clients. These clients refer more clients to you. And you repeat that. And at best, you become highly successful. In a business, you have zero control over. That's at best. That's the word of mouth death trap. I've had episodes on this. I've had YouTube videos on this. But it's something that I've seen so many people fall into because I've had so many conversations with people who are up to 100,000 a year, 200,000 a year, 250,000 a year. Some people that I've talked to in micro agencies at like 300,000 to 400,000 a year, they've grown there, many of them through this word of mouth snowball that I've talked about before. It's a wonderful thing to have word of mouth on your side. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem and the danger is relying only on that. And then you have these ups and downs, this feast or famine that can happen inevitably. And what happens when you're really successful and you've gotten there through word of mouth, and you see one of my ads where I talk about feast or famine, and you're the guy who's like, I've been busy for 20 years. My calendar's been book solid for 20 years, just from word of mouth. And then you have that one to two month, that three month span, that famine mode where it stops working, and you've built this lifestyle up over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, what we call lifestyle creep, where your income keeps going up. So my lifestyle income keeps going up. Now I have to have more expenses. I have a bigger house. I have better cars. I have more than I'm paying for. And that starts to go up as well. And when you get to this word of mouth death trap, inevitably the bottom drops out somewhere, and you end up eating your words. You end up seeking out people like me to help you, because now you don't know what to do, because you had zero control over it. Waiting around for clients is not an acquisition model. It is not a way to build a sustainable business that's going to be there for the long term. And at best, you can build it up to a certain point, but at worst, you end up hitting a plateau where you can't get past it, or you start shrinking in your income, or you hit one of those famine periods in this feast your famine roller coaster that freelancers generally ride on, this horrible roller coaster we don't want to be on. It's the world's worst roller coaster. You hit one of those famine periods, those dips in your income, for too long. The famine period lasts so long that your business basically dies. You're forced to go off and get a job or do something else other than freelancing because it didn't work for you. Or you have to massively downsize your life. Sell your house, sell your cars, buy old beat up cars, start renting a home that's smaller. All these things that I don't want anyone to have to do, all because you fell into this word of mouth death trap. And the reason this word of mouth death trap is something that I'm so passionate about is because it's something that you have zero control over. I'm an Enneagram 8 If you know the Enneagram 8, Enneagram 8s are challengers, and they also crave control over things. I wouldn't call myself a control freak, but I really do want to control those parts of my life and my business that really matter. So like maybe a healthy control freak, I do want control over those really important parts. I do not want to leave things to chance or leave things to someone else's hands that I can't trust if it's a crucial part of my life. I want to at least know how the things work so that if it's in someone else's hands, I know whether or not they're doing it correctly. So when you're relying on referrals or word of mouth clients, there's nothing you can go do to 3X the number of referrals you're getting overnight. So think about that. You could influence people by asking for more referrals. You could do that, and maybe you'll get a short bump in referrals, but then it'll quickly die off, and you likely will see a big dip in the next weeks or months from referrals you would have otherwise gotten. You essentially just clear out your pipeline of referrals. And all of this still depends on you having a good client base in the first place. So what about all the other people out there that either don't have a large client base or they're brand new and they're just getting into this? That's the topic of today. This episode is going to be all mapped around people that are already doing well, but they've hit a plateau or they're hitting these feast your famine months, or maybe your lifestyle creep is catching up with your income, and you don't want that big dip in income to happen because you've fallen into this word of mouth death trap. So I want to talk in this episode about a really boring topic on the surface that when we dig into it, you'll start to understand what I'm talking about here. It's inputs and outputs, clear inputs and clear outputs. And I said it before, but waiting around for referrals is not an action you can take. It is literally passive. So in order to keep this from happening, we have to create a client acquisition channel where you control the inputs.