You’re Booked Solid. Now What? | The Real Reason You’re Stuck at $100K

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 355

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. This episode is for my 6 Figure Plus freelancers out there. If you're making 100K a year or more, or you're just making less than that, but you're curious about this episode, this is for you, over the last few months, we have been working with larger and larger freelancers and even agencies. Our largest client is a $5 million a year agency, and our smallest client is somebody who just left their job at an agency and is now trying to go freelance. So they're basically at the beginning of their journey. So I've seen the entire journey, I've seen both sides, I've seen the middle, and this episode is more for that messy middle, the people that are at 100K a year trying to move up to eventually an agency level, even if it's like a micro agency. And at this point, I've seen so many 6 Figure freelancers stuck because they've hit their limit. It's usually between, it can be on the low end, 75,000 a year, usually around 100,000, 150,000 a year, you hit this limit of how much work you can take on. Sometimes it can be as high as 250, up to 300,000 or 400,000 a year. I've rarely seen a solo freelancer go beyond that. There are examples of that. But you can't take on more projects because you're booked solid, and you end up dropping the ball on the clients that you're working with because you've got so much stuff on your plate. So what happens is you either smartly start raising your rates in an effort to start essentially working with less clients, because the best way, in my opinion, to reject a client and let them know that you can't work with them is to just raise your rates so they have to move on to someone else. But that's the smart way of doing it, generally, if you're booked solid that much. The other way that people tend to respond to this when they're overwhelmed with too much work is they understandably keep taking on more and more work because they don't want to say no to money. And so they never really get out of this hole they get themselves into. And sometimes they just dig deeper and deeper and deeper where you're dropping the ball, you've got too much work going on, things are successful because you're making more money, but at a certain point, you've just plateaued. You cannot get past this upper limit that your business model has. So the question is, how can we break through this? Especially if your goal is to eventually become an agency owner. You're making that leap from solo freelancer to maybe micro agency with just a few, three or four people, or maybe even a full blown agency with a full team and everything. That is the whole point for this episode today. This is basically how you get past that six figure, low six figure kind of plateau, and eventually grow into high six figures or even seven figures. That's through the agency model. So I first want to, before I go into like the details of like how to do this or what sort of things to think through with this, I want to talk about working out. And the reason I brought this up is because, I forget where I heard this, but I heard someone talking about this, this kind of analogy. And most freelancers, they treat their business like fitness. Like if you're working out, or you're trying to get stronger, or you're trying to get faster, you're trying to get more flexible, or you want to run further, maybe you want to do ultra marathons. Whatever it is your fitness goal is, you're the one that has to put in the work in order to get there. You can hire a personal trainer, you can hire someone to help out, but they can only get you so far. You're obviously the person doing all of the work. They obviously can't work out for you. They can only help you be more efficient, work on the right things, et cetera, et cetera, but what if they could? What if they could work out for you? Think through that. What if you could hire a personal trainer? You could hire a running trainer to train for that marathon for you. What if you could hire some sort of powerlifting specialist to make you stronger? They do all the work and you get all the results. They go to the gym for you, they work out for you, they diet for you. They deal with all the muscle soreness, they deal with all the fatigue. They're the ones who have to wake up early to go to the gym before work. But you get all of the results. I personally would 100% do this. I like working out. Don't get me wrong. There's a certain element to it that's just a nice way to start my day. There might still be some version of that for me. It'd probably be just like a morning walk. If I could literally hire someone to do all the hard stuff, to give me the results that I want, I would 100% do it. And I think it would fundamentally change how the fitness industry worked as a whole if that were an option that people could do. Now, while that's a ridiculous premise, someone else working out for you and you getting the results, this is literally how it works in business. You hire an employee. They work for you. They do all of the work. And you as the business owner, you get all of the results for it. That is literally how an agency works. And that's what I want to dive into today. So if you're new here, I'm Brian Hood. This is 6 Figure Creative Podcast. The whole point of this podcast is to take influence from a lot of different businesses that I see, because we have over 200 freelance and agency businesses that we coach at this point, and help them with client acquisition and marketing and systems and processes and CRM setup and dealing with clients and all that stuff. So I get a really good top town view of a lot of different businesses at this point and a lot of different niches. And I take all those learnings and bring them to the podcast. And also I take a lot of influence from outside of industries like the SaaS industry. I've talked about this on past episodes where I looked at the software as a service industry. A lot of other industries have really cool things we can bring back for freelancers to implement. And that's the goal here is to not become a homogenous business where you are simply looking to your left and to your right in your tiny little circle to say, I'm gonna be the other photographer that's gonna have a stupid gallery website with no copy on it and no information about me or why you should pick me over everyone else. That's what I don't want here today is you to be yet another freelancer who looks like everyone else. That sounds like something you're interested in. You're in the right place.