There’s a lot of business advice out there to help freelancers get to six figure income quickly, and it’s true that a lot of it works.
But a lot of it is also exceptionally unhealthy for you – physically, mentally, spiritually, you name it.
The Burnout Cycle
A six figure student of Mike Shreeve’s recently experienced this first hand, burning out after reaching the coveted $10,000/month mark in just 3 months.
So he came to Mike for advice about how to get back to that income level in a way that’s both healthy and sustainable for the long-term, and Mike “Sensei” Shreeve did not disappoint.
In this podcast episode, Founder and Head Troublemaker of The No Pants Project, Mike Shreeve uses his 10 years of successful freelancing wisdom to help guide his student back to six figures – sustainably.
We’ve outlined the key soundbytes here, so strap in and grab your pen – this is noteworthy, game-changing stuff!
1. Close More, and Higher Quality, Clients By Productizing Your Offerings
So now we have to make a product?!
Not at all, as Mike explains:
“We’re still offering a service. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we’re going to go build a course and a program.
“In my freelancing business, I have a program which we just call the “Millionaire Maker” and it’s not a program. It’s a service.
“It is completely built out like a menu item in that it is: ‘Here’s what you get, here’s what you do, here’s what it costs, here’s the end result of what we do together.’
“No one can make changes because it is built on a result.”
But of course, the service is customized and tweaked for each individual client and their particular business.
[You can read all about the details of Mike’s “Millionaire Maker”, and how you can create your own high-ticket service here.]
And that’s what you need to do in your own business if you’re looking for long-term, sustainable six figure success.
It comes back to the critical idea of anti-commoditizing yourself.
If all you offer is a service or talent that anyone can learn with some time, it becomes harder for your prospects to see and understand the value of what you do, and encourages them to look for the cheapest person who can get the job done.
That means your only ticket to higher profits is lower prices and more volume, and as a freelancer that’s the same formula that creates a crash and burnout.
Clients think in terms of results, so you need to build your business offerings in that same language.
How do you decide what result to offer?
“Identify a very specific client from your current roster of clients, or someone that maybe you haven’t worked with yet but you think you could work with.
“Identify if that person could just wave a magic wand, what result would they end up with? What are they looking for? And then, what would it cost you to deliver that to them?”
– Mike “Magic (But Not Like That Movie) Maker” Shreeve
After you get to the root of what your clients really want, you can work out how to package your various skills and what you might need to learn more about in order to deliver that result.
But in order to do this right, you need to…
2. Pick One Ideal Client, Build Them Into Your Product, and Only Talk To Them
Let’s talk efficiency and productivity – the keys to sustainable six figure freelancing, when it comes down to it.
Efficiency is all about cutting out unnecessary resource expenditures and productivity is all about using your time wisely.
By disqualifying prospects first, instead of spending time trying to qualify them, you’re making your lead generation more efficient and your prospecting calls more productive.
You’re only getting on the phone with people who self-identify as your ideal client and see the value in what you do. Then, instead of spending time on explanations or introductions, you cut straight to the details of the prospect’s situation and whether or not it’s a good match.
To make this happen in your own business, you need to get nitty-gritty on the details of your ideal client.
“You say: ‘I work with people who can afford exactly this much, who have this and this and this already in their business, and this is the specific result that they’re looking for.’
“What you’ve just done is said, ‘Here’s my dream client, here’s who I work with. If that’s not you, I’m sorry, this product isn’t built for you.’
“If you do it well, you don’t have a sales process because they will sell it to themselves. They’ll say, oh, that’s me. Oh my gosh, that’s me. And that’s exactly the result I’m looking for. Why don’t I just buy it?”
– Michael Shreeve
Done right, this will transform how easy it is for you to close a new client and the quality of clients you’re working with.
Which means it will transform how stressful and hectic your current business is, replacing it with one that is calm, stable (even more so than a 9-5), and sustainable.
But the true beauty of productizing your services this way shines through when you…
3. Reduce Creative Burden and Guarantee Results By Systemizing Your Product
When you figure out how to provide this one, specific result, you can minimize the amount of new creative work you need to do while still netting the same results time and time again.
“Part of productizing your service is to minimize new creative work, meaning having to recreate your business every time you have a new client and resolve the same puzzle.
“You only have to design it once.
“Really all the work that you do is the personalization piece, and you’re able to consistently deliver results because the people who are buying from you, you’ve already identified as the people who are most likely to succeed.”
– Mike “Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke” Shreeve
That means you’ll have more balance and consistency in your working hours AND your results.
It also means you’ll be able to gauge your capacity for new clients much more accurately, which makes your position less dicey when life happens because you’re a lot less likely to have overextended yourself.
To do this right as a freelancer, make it so that personalization is the only piece that requires your focused attention, and the rest is a set system with proven results you tweak to suit a new client.
This could mean creating templates or step-by-step process flows for yourself, or outsourcing repetitive tasks to a VA.
By only serving one ideal client and systemizing your service, you’ll be able to scale your business even beyond $10,000/month and sustain a six figure income much more easily.
Add a few more trusted team members into the mix to help you, and you’ve got a bonafide business – something that runs and produces results without your daily input or needing to be the mythical “Master of All Trades”.
But if that idea makes you feel a little squirmy, then you need to…
4. Adjust Your Money Mindset: You’re Paid For The Value Of The Results You Create, NOT The Hours You Put In
Only when you disconnect your belief about why you are paid from the hours you work, can you scale a business – and this is where most freelancers stumble.
This is part of something usually called the “employee mindset” in entrepreneurial circles, where you’re stuck in the cultural idea that the amount of money you bring home is directly proportional to the hours you work.
But when you’re a business owner, it doesn’t work like that.
You deserve money when you deliver results, not when you punch a clock.
Implicitly, you already know this – after all, everyone in a 9-5 job works the same amount of hours, yet there is a huge variation in their salaries. That’s because the company values the results people are supposed to deliver each year differently.
Even though corporate employers often talk about wanting experience, they don’t pay someone a higher hourly rate/yearly salary for experience.
They pay them more because they assume their experience means they’ll deliver better results in the same amount of time – i.e. they’ll create more value, faster.
Hackernoon illustrates this in an example that sees everyday consumers as hiring products to do jobs of fulfilling their needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy (so you can see how this applies to actual jobs):
“Any job a customer hires a product for can be expressed on the dimensions of fulfilling these many needs. The more levels a job entails, the more valuable is that job for the customer and they will be happy to pay higher prices for them.
“Why are they willing to pay higher prices? Because as you go higher the job gets more specific — less people will have them and less products can fulfill the requirements for that job. A job might not involve every layer in the hierarchy but it remains that improvements in a higher layer will be more highly valued.”
So if you’re still in a day job, you’re already subject to this results-oriented mindset of a business. You even use it in your everyday consumer behavior.
You just have to adopt it for your own business.
“If you believe that you are paid for the work that you do, the kind of business you have right now is the result of that mindset, versus a shift to:
“‘I’m paid for the results that I get other people, for what I give, not the work I do. Whether it takes me 10 hours or two hours or 20 minutes, I’m paid for the results that I get.’
“Then it’s a light bulb moment. You’re like, hold on a second. That means how much I make has nothing to do with how much I’m working.”
– Mike Shreeve
Now you’re cooking with fire!
5. The Goal Is To Get Your Business To A Place Where You’re Bored With It
“Meaning everything in your business is: we know what works and we just repeat it and we repeat it.
“And that’s for client getting, that’s for running the business. That’s for providing the service to your clients because that’s the best time to hire.”
– Mike “Routine Is The Route To Riches” Shreeve
The idea that freelancing means constant new clients, constant new gigs, adrenaline, and deadlines, is the very same idea that causes mass burnout in the gig economy, and is wrong to begin with.
It’s not sustainable.
If you don’t have clear, repeatable processes laid out for how you get new clients, how you deliver your services, how you get paid, and so on, then your business is poised to collapse at any time.
The massive explosion of industry wasn’t caused by excitement and new ideas.
It was reliant on the assembly line.
The most routine, boring path to production and sales at massive scale.
So build yourself an assembly line in your business.
Make it so clear and so easy that all you need to do is pop in a few people to keep the thing running, no fancy degrees or years of experience required.
Even better, make a process for how you teach your processes to your team.
Have all the processes.
Then, refine them until it runs so smoothly you might as well be watching paint dry (when you aren’t doing the high-level tasks that light you up!).
That’s when you’ll see nearly effortless, sustained six figure success.
And lastly…
6. Stop The Energy Dispersion and Focus On ONE Thing At A Time
Look – by now we should all know that multitasking is a myth.
Human brains are already so busy just keeping us alive that adding any more than one mental task at a time is impossible.
So even though we all hear, and even preach, that you should always be working on building multiple income streams to be truly financially stable, that doesn’t mean you should be actively working on more than one at once.
“If you consider everything you do takes a little bit of energy, a little bit of focus, let’s say that everyday you start with a hundred units of energy.
“Everything that requires you to think, everything that requires you to create everything that requires you to emote takes one unit of energy.
“If you want to make $10,000 a month on a thing, you need to have invested 10,000 energy points. If you give 1 here, 1 there, 2 here, 5 there, 10 there… it’s going to take a lot longer for any one thing to have accumulated enough of these energy points.”
– M. Shreeve
Basically, if expend your energy on two different businesses or income streams at once, you’re going to end up with two halves that do not make a whole.
“Multiple streams of income diffuse your laser focus from a single point of high probability success into a scattered beam of ineffectual light.
“It creates multiple demands on your limited time and energy, turning your relationships, family, spirituality, business and investing into a difficult juggling act.
“Something will likely suffer, and that something will probably be you.”
In other words, you’re going to end up with nothing to show for it.
Instead, prioritize your business ideas and work through them one at a time – get to the boring routine place with each one before you move on to the next.
Any other way requires you to hustle, grind, and ultimately, burn out.
In Short:
“We could have simply talked for 40 minutes about how he needs to hustle and grind and do 15 hour days…
“… but instead we found a solution to achieving the same results, which is life centered, which allows for flexibility, which allows for taking care of health, which allows for what is most important in the world of freelancing, which is longevity and sustainability.”
– Mike “Build Your Business Around Your Life” Shreeve
The solution to real, lasting six figure success as a freelancer?
- Productize your services. Having a set menu allows people to sell themselves on what it is they want. Like Starbucks, you still allow room for customization, but you make your services and their value clear to anyone looking at them.
- Pick one ideal client, build your entire service around them, and don’t talk to anyone else. To do it right, find the result your ideal client is looking for, put together a service that delivers it, and outline exactly who it’s for with nitty-gritty detail. Then, the only people you talk to are those who have self-identified as desiring that result and being your ideal client.
- Reduce creative burden and guarantee results by getting choosy about who you take on as clients. With your ideal client in place and your service outlined, systemize how it’s executed and focus your prospecting conversations on whether the client is a good fit and prepared to succeed.
- With systems in place, you’re in position to scale. But to really succeed, you need to have addressed the common “employee mentality” freelancers struggle with. Stop believing that the money you make is dependent on the hours you work. Instead, know for a fact that the money you earn is directly proportional to the value you create, no matter how much or how little time was spent to create it.
- Get your business systems running so smoothly that taking care of it becomes absolutely boring. If a part breaks, you know exactly where and how to insert a replacement, and can do it immediately. Then, you can scale even higher.
- Stop trying to do more than one thing at once, or you’ll end up with exactly zero results. Dedicate your resources to a single business at a time, a single service offering, until it’s running smooth as silk and boring as drying paint. Only then are you ready to start creating a new stream of income.
By putting all this advice into action, you reduce stress, you reduce time requirements, and you position yourself to focus on the highest value tasks and create excellent results.
For extra reading, Mike recommends “Built To Sell” to give you the roadmap to making each of these steps happen.
Without this system, you will need to sacrifice your health for your income, or your income for your health – and that’s not a lifestyle business.
Treat this like a step-by-step cheat sheet, get laser-focused, and you’ll find your way to sustainable six figure income faster than you thought possible.
For help productizing, identifying your ideal clients, and building your systems, join us in The No Pants Project.
Listen to the full podcast episode here, and hop through to iTunes to leave a rating and subscribe if you’d like to hear more about what it takes to freelance your way to six figure success – and beyond.
Got your service productized and ready to go, but short on ideal clients? Find out how to attract premium clients with a two-page website and authentic selling.
