Your Feast-Or-Famine Roller Coaster: Three Reasons Why Freelancers Never Escape This Vicious Cycle

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 227

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 the first time watching the show today, you picked a weird episode to come in on for your first time. If you're not watching this on YouTube, I am literally sitting in the hotel room on a beanbag chair. I say sitting, I'm kind of lounging back on a beanbag chair for those who are just listening right now, because this hotel room has a bed. It has a day bed, no chair. And so I'm resorting to this, as you see right here, because when you're traveling, sometimes you just have to make this stuff work. So for my first time listeners, the show was created to help equip you with the tools you need in order to run a successful creative business without selling your soul, without resenting your business, and without having to give up, fail, go back to a day job. So today's episode is right in line with that theme. I'm going to talk about the Feast or Famine roller coaster that many freelancers experience. Even the most successful freelancers I know, they might have extreme periods of Feast where they just have so many projects or have to turn things away. They have more money than they know to do with. And then they have these long periods of drought, famine. They're eating into their savings. No one likes those famine periods. No one wants long stretches of time where you have little to no income, even if you've prepared for it. And for those of you who are just starting out, this is doubly as important because maybe you have finally taken the leap from a day job and you had that nest egg saved up and you start off strong, which was kind of how I started off. And then you start to kind of slowly die off and you're in the long period of famine. That's the kind of stuff that can end an amazing, what would be an amazing freelance journey for you. It can end it before it even really had a chance to start. So the Feast of Famine Rollercoaster is the destroyer of many freelance businesses. And I want to really dive into three things specifically that are holding you back from eliminating that from your life, from your business. It is possible to have a business, especially as a freelancer, without having to go in the ups and downs of that Feast of Famine Rollercoaster. And if I were, honestly, if I were to have a room full of a thousand freelancers or the 10,000 plus that listen to the show, if I were to say, hey, raise your hand, if you like dependability, stability, predictability with your business, you don't want Feast of Famine in your business, every single one of you would raise your hands. That's a universal thing. But I would have to ask you, are you prepared to do what it takes to make that happen? We'll find out today. This is actually gonna be a tough love episode for many of you listening right now. And if this is your first taste in me, that's kind of how my style is. I tell it to you straight, but I tell it to you with love. I don't want you to feel bad about not doing some of these things, or maybe you were doing some of these things that I talked about today or not doing these things, whatever. I don't want you to feel bad about it. But I do want you to know that, hey, it's time to change if that is you.

So just some quick travel updates for those who are longtime listeners of the show and you've been keeping up with what I've been doing. I've been on the road for the last couple of months now with my wife. We spent about a month in Bali. We've been in Thailand for the last few weeks, and we're currently in Chiang Mai right now. And we came here for something known as the Lantern Festival. You've probably seen this in movies. Maybe you've seen this in photos where they have the thousands of lanterns in the sky. They're like floating lanterns with the fire where it's like a big balloon kind of floating up in the air. That's what we came here for. So this is, you know, 2022 It's like the first big event they've had in Chiang Mai that I know of at least since COVID happened. And this was one of the things we specifically booked flights and hotels and everything for well in advance because we wanted to be here for this week.