I am sure you agree with me – as a freelancer, you are running a business.
Sure, it has fewer employees than most. Probably will never have as much profit as Apple or Ferrari. And maybe its offices are not as fancy as others.
And yet, it is a business nonetheless.
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That’s why I think that as a freelancer, you should read business books. They provide advice that most of us have never heard of. And while some of it is hardly applicable to one-person businesses, a huge part can easily be transferred to our freelancing.
Over the years I have read tons of great books from entrepreneurs who made millions. But none of them impressed me as much as a short book called 100M Offers, by a guy called Alex Hormozi.
Who’s this guy, and why should I care?
Alex Hormozi has gained a significant following on his social channels over the last couple of years, but he’s not new to the game of entrepreneurship.
He has built a fortune in his 20s as an online entrepreneur, and has since started sharing his knowledge about building businesses in books, social channels and basically anywhere on the Internet.
If you are into entrepreneurship and online marketing, you have probably seen at least one of his videos.
Yet, as a freelancer, you may think what he preaches is hardly applicable to your business.
And that would be a mistake.
In fact, his basic framework for building a six figure business helped me to:
- Manage my time better
- Adopt a laser-focused approach
- Find more clients
- Define my ICP (ideal customer persona)
Here is how I applied his advice to develop a stupid simple system for my freelance business.
Say NO often so that your YES matters
If you’ve been a freelancer for more than 3 months, you have probably experienced feast and famine.
- You are working on a project or two, and the client pays well. You are doing great
- You have no work at all, or you are forced to take low-paying gigs to at least make ‘something’
- Your next big job lands, and you are back in feast mode… for a while
In a way or another, most freelance businesses have the same issue, and the cause is usually simple. When you are fully booked, you don’t have time to promote your services. Which also means, when your big project ends, you don’t have new leads already in your pipeline.
That’s how famine is born.
Solution? Learn to say no.
Actually, don’t start by saying no. First create a list of to-do marketing tasks for the next few months, up to a year. Then plan your schedule so that you always have the time to take care of them.
The easiest way to do this is by time boxing your days. Time boxing doesn’t have to be difficult. What’s difficult is actually protecting your boxes.
That’s when you need to say no.
Only if you refuse to give up your marketing hours will you be able to actually do the promotion work.
And this may also include saying no to other clients’ projects.
Wait, saying no to work to later get work?
I realize it may sound counter intuitive, but… yes. Because the work you are saying no to is contributing to the feast, but it’ll only make your famine worse when it hits.
Instead, if you say no today, you are building the foundation to create a famine-free business.
Once that foundation is set, it’s time to focus on actually building it!
One of the biggest takeaways from most of Hormozi’s contents is this: the easiest way to scale a business to six figures is focusing on one product, one channel, one avatar.
Here’s what that looks like.
Don’t spread too thin: One product (read service)
On a surface level, all freelancers offer a simple service. In my case, it’s translation. For you it may be content writing, web design or anything else.
And yet, what meets the eye is not always the truth.
While it may look like I offer translation (one service), I actually provide different things to different clients:
- Financial translation services to FX and crypto platforms
- Transcreation services to boutique marketing agencies
- Game localization services to small development studios
If you look at what you offer today, I am sure you will find something similar.
This approach, though, is not efficient.
- Your branding becomes much more challenging – when you want to be perceived as the go-to expert for something, when you claim to be that expert in 3 different areas you are making your life harder.
- When you do one thing only, over time you become extremely quick at doing it. If you are doing three things instead, you are unlikely to ever become as productive.
- I know you think all your services are important, but I am sure if you do the math, you will see that at least one or two of them actually contribute very little to your overall income. That was the case for me as well.
If you want to run a profitable freelance business, the path is pretty clear – work to understand what your most profitable service is, then focus on that one only.
Mastery before expansion: One channel
This is the single most important lesson I learned from Alex Hormozi’s book “100M leads” – while there are several ways to get leads (potential clients), you don’t need to use all of them.
Actually, you don’t need to use most of them.
The easiest way to scale your business is by focusing on one channel only, till you master it. What should that channel be? That is up to you to find out.
As a translator, I know I can’t use SEO – I would be competing with translation agencies with a budget that’s more than 100x mine. I can, however, send cold pitches. Create short YouTube videos. Or join a community of entrepreneurs for networking purposes.
What does this mean for you?
If you run an established freelance business, focus on the channel that’s generating the majority of potential clients for you. If you are following multiple strategies (and let’s be honest, clients are not really running through the door), maybe it’s time you focus on one single method.
And if you are actively posting on social media, but it looks like the very few likes you get on each post are all from fellow freelancers, maybe consider if you really need a social media presence.
I have written before about how I became a six-figure freelancer without networking on social media. Maybe you are like me, and you have to pass through other channels.
If that’s the case… so be it.
Talk to a single person: One avatar
The last piece of the puzzle is ‘One avatar’. If you have never heard of ‘ideal customer personas/profiles’, here is a short explanation:
Your ICP (ideal client profile) is your dream client, the client that has the budget to afford your services, the volume of work to keep you busy for several hours per week and the kind of project that you enjoy the most doing (bonus points if it’s also the one you are most productive at.)
While your ICP will vary based on the service you decide to provide, your success will largely depend on who is buying your service.
It’s one thing to write personal finance articles for a newly-established affiliate site at $0.02/word, and a completely different thing to write blog posts for high-caliber financial firms with a marketing budget of more than $1M+… per month.
Once you have decided who you want to work with, try to make their picture as vivid as possible in your head – man or woman? Age? What’s their academic background and socioeconomic status?
I have heard of freelancers who become really granular with their analysis – down to the brands they wear at work and the influencers they follow on Instagram.
While you should only go as deep as you want, a similar approach helps, whether you want to write the copy of your website or you need to decide what aspects to emphasize in a sales call.
Key takeaways
Whether you are just starting out as a freelancer or you are a veteran with 10+ years of experience, building a freelance business that works for you is an infinite game.
Using Hormozi’s framework, I managed to simplify my business to the extreme, working fewer hours without losing income. The same system, though, can be used to work on more interesting projects or land better-paying clients.
Next month, we are going to dive even deeper into the first element of the system: your One product.
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