You’re the Bottleneck — Here’s the Fix | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 360

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 is the fifth episode in the series that I'm calling the Multi-6 Figure Freelancer Playbook. And as you scale into six figures and you're trying to get to multi-six figures, you're going to feel multiple times where you are the bottleneck of the business. Everything goes through you. Every single person, every single thing is held up because of you. That is going to be super normal as you grow. It never really goes away. You just get to different levels of always being the bottleneck. But in the early stages, the first few times you hit this, which is 75,000, 100,000 a year, 150,000 a year, definitely once you get into 200,000, 250,000 a year, depending on your pricing and your structure and your model and all that, as you get to those thresholds and you become the bottleneck, you're going to start dropping the ball on a lot of things. You're going to forget to follow up with people. You're going to forget to send things to people. You're going to lose emails from people. You're going to delay deliverables to clients. You're going to spend weekends trying to catch up on things. And so projects just always feel chaotic. It's because you're doing your admin 15 different ways. There's no consistency there. You're doing every single project from scratch because you're a nice creative who wants to be creative in all things. And so everything has to be unique in all ways. And you've been avoiding building out proper systems in your business because you just don't have time. So you always feel like you'd never have time to invest in those sorts of things, which you never will. If you don't actually take the time to do it. And so not only are you the creative behind your business, you're the project manager, you're the CFO, you're the account manager, you're the admin, you're your own personal assistant in this case. And so when this happens, your brain is doing all of this work that your system should be doing for you. And when this happens, you cap how much you can earn because you physically can't take on more work. You end up again dropping the ball on clients, thus diminishing your trust. There's a reason that freelancers generally have sketchy reputations because we just tend to drop the ball and erode the trust that we've built up with our clients over time. You can't take time off because, my God, why would you take time off? You have too much to do, thus leading to burnout. And then to top it all off, you're stuck in a business that's just busy, busy all the time, miserable to run, but it's not smart. And the irony is the more you systemize, the more you can actually focus on being a creative. Because think about this, how can you be creative when you're constantly stressed out? Waking up in the middle of the night, thinking through, I forgot to send that email, I forgot to send this project off at 3 a.m. You can't go back to sleep now. You're sending emails at 3 a.m. because you forgot to, you dropped the ball. How can you possibly be creative when that's happening? When clients are constantly mad at you, when you are constantly spending time just looking for sh** that you lost because you never labeled things or organized things correctly. This part of running a business is not fun. I think you and I can agree to that. So instead, let's talk about three main systems you need to break through that plateau that you're at right now, where you're the bottleneck and scale up to that next level. Whatever that is for you. For most people listening to this series, it's people that want to break into that multi-6 Figure range. And the best part of this episode is I'm not going to try to get you to hire someone. If you want a hiring guide, you want me to yell at you, talk you into hiring people for your business, go back to episode 355, you're booked solid, now what? The real reason you're stuck in 100K. But whether you're hiring, which is again, a great thing once you're past 100K, not what we're talking about this episode, or you're just trying to systemize and build off these three systems, if you can do this well, you're going to earn more money per hour, which is the goal for a lot of people listening to this, not just a series, but this podcast in general, you're going to have fewer drop balls, which means less stress, happier clients, more time to be creative, and then ultimately a more enjoyable business, which is what we all want here. It's a business that we can enjoy to run. We can be creative. Let's build the systems out that allow you to be creative. So before I get to the topic today, if you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This podcast is for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. One of the best ways to do that is to systemize your business. I take a lot of influence and inspiration from industries outside of just the freelance world, but also within the different sub industries and sub niches within the freelance world, there's a lot of you that listen to the show, a lot of different industries. And I love taking things that I've learned elsewhere and bringing to this podcast to help you. Because at the end of the day, we don't want a homogenous, what I call an inbred business where there's no diversity, there's no outside influence. Those are horrible businesses to run. Take best practices for other industries and apply them to your business. If you want it better, more profitable, happier, better to run business. So let's talk about the three systems to build out. The first system is a client onboarding system. I have a whole episode on this back in episode 293, which was January 4th, 2024 So well over a year ago, it was part of our Infinite Client Series, and the episode was titled, The Five Step Blueprint for Perfect Client Onboarding. If you want to hear that episode, just go to 6figurecreative.com/293, just those three numbers at the end of the URL, and that'll take you straight to the show notes page of that episode where you can watch the video or listen to the audio, whatever you want to do.