Always Chasing Clients = You're Doing This Wrong

Hey guys, I want to let you know about an online event that we're planning. It's called the 10X your freelancing summit. And we'd love to see you there. I have invited 15 expert speakers, some of which you may know from the podcast. They're going to show their best strategies for growing a six or seven figure business. And you can grab a completely free ticket at 10xfreelance.com or by clicking the link in our show notes. And if you decide to upgrade to our power ticket or our VIP ticket, you can get a nice discount by entering promo code podcast at checkout. We really hope to see you at the 10X your freelancing summit in August and now on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of freelance to founder where we help you start freelancing, grow your agency and live the work life you've always wanted. You can send in your questions for us to answer at freelance to founder.com/ask. We have an email feature, a voicemail feature, however you want to get to us, we would love to answer your questions. My name is Preston. I started freelancing in college. From there, I've built, grown or sold a few businesses. And together with my guest co-hosts, I'm ready to help you do the same. If you're ready to grow your service-based business into something bigger, if you're ready to become a founder, this show is for you. We're here answering your questions every single week day, as I said. And today, I'm here again for the third time in a row with my friend AJ Casada from revenue boost. Revenue boost is an agency that helps generate leads for B2B businesses. Welcome, AJ. Thanks again for having me back, Preston. Looking forward to doing another. Yeah, absolutely. You've been great so far the last couple episodes. So thank you, thank you. And why don't you quickly, before we dive into an episode into this question, in this episode, just remind people who you are where you're coming from. Yeah, for sure. So I, in agency owner, used to also be a freelancer, of course. That's how generally it always starts. But I've been running agency for about five years. And my company, Revenue Boost, helps B2B businesses. So SaaS companies, AMC, some freelancers as well. We have some generate leads through a cold email outreach. Excellent, I love it. We're going to hear more about AJ's business at the end of the episode. We'll be sure to link to his stuff so you can check him out. Let's jump into today's question. So the question comes from Tamer. And I actually stole this question from Twitter or from X. But I really like the idea of it. And I think hopefully we'll have some interesting things to say about it. Here's what he says. He says freelancing is wild. One week feels like, how do I get leads? And the next week you're buried in projects. And I think the implied question is, how do I even that out? Right? It's such a roller coaster of like, I have all this work to do. And then I don't have any work. And then I get a bunch of leads and then I don't get any leads. How do I even that out and make my business feel a little more predictable? What advice would you have to kick us off here, AJ? Yeah, that is the age-old freelancing dilemma, right? There's two things that come to mind. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts as well, Preston. But the first thing is try to see if you could create some recurring revenue in the business. Even if you have a business or an offer that doesn't feel like recurring revenue or it's project-based, there's always something you can offer on a monthly basis like whether it's consulting, whether it's maintenance, etc. Because actually, I completely changed my business around two years ago. We were just doing project-based and we switched to fully recurring revenue. And that's just done absolutely wonders for not only our growth and profitability, but just my stress and uncertainty of managing that roller coaster right. Because even if we don't get a lot of leads one month and even if we don't sell any clients, I still know that we're making money and I have work right. So I think that's like the, if people could just only do one thing to solve it, that would already help a lot. And then the second thing is start to create some systems where you can still bring in leads even without your time, right? Because the problem is, as a freelancer, you generate a bunch of leads, then you close those leads and then you do the work. And then yourself as you do the work, you don't have time to generate more leads. But if you can always happen to some marketing happening in the background on autopilot, whether it's some ads running at a very little volume or you run cold email, but it's automated and it breaks a couple leads a month or you have an email lift you build up and you just send a couple emails a month like you always want something happening. And that's kind of what happens as you go from freelancer to founder. You start to really build systems that work for you rather than just you doing all the work. So I would just say look at like one or two things you can always be doing. No matter what's happening with you getting busy with projects, you always have at least some marketing activity happening so that you know, these are coming in and it's not just a ghost town when you're done with your product overload. But what are your thoughts on that person? Yeah, I love that. I think that ability to like always have clients on tap as a were like always available. You turn on and off the faucet as you need business or don't need business. And so building in those systems was a complete game changer for me when that when that ultimately happened in my business. That's when I feel like I went from like, okay, everything is relying on me. If I don't, if I'm not in this business 24/7 worrying about it stressing about it, it's going to die, right? And there is a time for that. Like I think we all kind of start that way and we go like, look, I just got to get a little bit of revenue in the door. I got to prove to myself I can do this. I got to prove to my partner or my family or just to myself or to the world that I can do this. But at some point, yeah, you're going to get past that, right? And it's going to, and you're going to say, okay, I will burn out. I will not survive if I have to be this in my business all the time. And even even the biggest, most successful entrepreneurs, right? You hear them talk about this. And we don't talk about it maybe enough in entrepreneurship where it's just like, you have to start thinking about your own personal well-being in addition to growing an awesome business. So I think that what you said, AJ, about processes to me is critical. And you hit on the head something that I talk about all the time, which is if you're in a feast famine cycle, it's because your marketing is in a feast famine cycle, right? Like you said, when you don't have work, you do tons of marketing. When you're busy with work, your marketing drops. That's the feast famine of marketing. And so you have to always keep up some sort of marketing effort. And I think to maybe add to what you said, not only do you keep up some sort of marketing effort, but I would say if your marketing is recurring and passive, your income will be recurring and passive, right? So build systems in your marketing, whether that's running Facebook ads, whether that's scheduling out, a bunch of social posts, whether that's scheduling out, a bunch of cold email are using an automation email automation tool. And I'd love to hear AJ if there's one that you recommend. I've used one called reply that I really like. And a few others that I've tested out, but using an automation tool where I literally can drop in a person's email company name and their name and it'll sort of populate an email. I know there's some awesome AI tools now that and some not so awesome ones that will like scan my LinkedIn and pull out details and write a custom email for me. And so I think, you know, if you can do something like one or two days a month and it stretches out your marketing for the next two weeks or 30 days, that can be really helpful too to just constantly have something out there to be potentially bringing you to business. Yeah, really great points. And especially that you brought up scheduling posts, like, you know, if this happens a lot, then why not just keep a bank of 30 or 50 posts just on your Google Drive somewhere. And then when you get to a really busy month, you just have those to sort of draw from, right? And then yeah, you also asked about automation tools, reply that's a good one. I personally use instant lead on AI. That's a good one. I think they're both pretty comparable. I think a lot of these tools all generally do the same thing, but I use instantly for a couple of years and they're pretty awesome. But yeah, it's just like you explained, you just, you can drop in a lead list, you can just load up a template and it's just going to send emails for you so that you don't have to actually be there, be there doing it. But whatever you do, just at least do something, at least one thing is happening no matter, you know, how busy or like you said, it's just just a day a month, right? Like I think all of us can afford to set aside a day a month. So it's really not that much to ask. Yeah, or what I even, you know, some people might say, like, I don't have time to build a leads list or whatever. I even got to the point where the systems were so well set up, I don't do it this way, this way, quite as much anymore, but at one point when I was going really hard with cold outreach, I, I set it all up so that all I had to do was drop into reply an email address and a name of a person and it would start on this like sequence, right? Where I was sending cold emails that I knew were successful. And so it was really cool because I didn't even have to set aside a day a month. I just as I was working as I came across things, I would come across maybe a company or a person who I thought might be an interesting client. And I would just drop them in like I just left that tab open and I copied and pasted their email address. I used, I think I used Hunter, which is like an email address finder. There's tons and tons of those as well. But I didn't even have to set aside time. I just like was going about my day finding these people anyway and then just added them to that sequence and then all of a sudden the tools working for me in the background. So there's some really cool tools out there to help you bring your marketing out of that Feast Fam and Cycle so that then your client acquisition also follows. Yeah, I love it definitely. Well, I want to take a quick break. We'll hear from our sponsors and then I want to see if there's anything else we want to tackle for Tamer here. On this like Feast Fam and Roller Coaster scenario, it will be right back. Waiting days for simple website changes or shipping something that looks AI generated instead of professional, you need to know about Framer. 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I want to move into the following question, which is how much do I have to even that out before I feel like my freelancing business can become an agency? AJ, I'm thinking, is it mission critical to start an agency? Does my feast famine cycle have to be all evened out? Or can an agency survive on feast famine or what changes as we start to think through? I'm not just a freelancer anymore. I'm now growing a company and other people are relying on me. I don't know what thoughts do you have there? That's a really interesting way to think about it, but very important because if you eventually are trying to grow an agency then where does the feast stand playing in the picture? I don't think it's something you just have to perfectly solve before you start an agency because I think that could be a dangerous mindset when we trap ourselves in procrastination and perfectionism of never having to start an agency. A lot of agencies I know, quite a lot of them also are in that feast famine cycle, just maybe a smaller microcosm of it. I would just say if you're thinking, hey, my lead's earned consistent and I really want to scale the agency, definitely try to solve a lead generation thing first before you start hiring a whole team. At least make sure you have one way to bring a lead that's not just randomness through frozen your network. Once you hire employees, I do want to have at least three to six months of their salary set aside for one thing because things can always be up and down with business. You don't want to hire them and then let them go a few months later because you have been brought in enough clients. You want to promise them that stability and be able to keep moving forward with your goals. I would say you have to have it perfect. Usually most businesses under a million dollars a year I think are always going to have some sort of up and down with their acquisition. It doesn't have to be perfect but it should be a little better than what you have now if your business is very, very up and down. To me, I would just find that it's having at least one method to bring a client that you control and you can influence. Again, if you're starting to hire people for two, five, ten came on to whatever it is to bring in some full-time team members, that's going to be really stressful if you don't have a way to make the revenue catch up. Other than that, I would just say start slow. Things are up and down with the agency and you're kind of up and down with your freelance practice and you're kind of hesitant to start the agency because of this just hire one person, just hire that a commentator or the designer or whatever that first person is. It's not like if you envision this big agency for yourself and you're scared to do because you haven't really quite figured out the lead generation side. It's not like you have to build it all at once. You can kind of say baby steps and just make sure that you're at least covered for some time, even if the revenue takes a little bit of time to catch up to the new expenses you brought on. Yeah, well said. I think this could also be a great opportunity as your first hire. Even if it's a contractor part-time someone, but your first hire could actually be what we talked about in the first half of this episode, which is someone who could do your marketing or your lead gen on a regular basis. Or hiring an agency like yours to help people generate leads. You didn't ask me to bring this up, but certainly you could either make a hire where you could hire someone who's doing that all the time or you could hire an agency like yours where it's like, if you guys can offload for me all of these tasks around getting new leads and I can just work on projects, that's a great way for my business to start to grow and start to be more predictable. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, ultimately one way or another, every freelance who wants to transition to an agency owner, they have to solve it. That's pretty much the most common problem. You even said it in one of the early episodes this week that you get a cause lot from the show, people just saying that they're freelancing and they get all their clients from referrals, right? So one way or another, that's really the big boss to defeat, but you could definitely get some help with it. Yeah, it might be a smart first hire. We've talked on previous episodes, not other episodes without UAJ, unfortunately, but we've talked about like, who's your best first hire? Do you hire a VA? Do you hire someone who can do project work? And I'm not sure I've ever really considered if you hire someone that just focuses on getting business in the door, which seems foolish that I haven't thought of that before, but it seems like such a wise first hire where they can really even out that roller coaster revenue. Yeah, absolutely. Who is your first hire at your first ad agency? Yeah, they were more of like a production worker. So they did more of our design work and creative work. And so in hindsight, I don't think I would probably do that again. It really depends on what role you want to assume, because what that had me then assume, which I was okay with, but it had me then assume the role of a business owner as opposed to doing some of the creative work. And I missed a little bit of that, but really I enjoy growing businesses and building businesses and finding clients and I enjoy marketing and things like that. And so it was okay. But yeah, what about you? Who did you hire very first? Yeah, same was also like a production person to help with the client fulfillment. Yeah, it seems like I'm pretty obvious first hire. Yeah, definitely. I think, I don't know, I mean, I actually also never thought of having the first hire be like a salesperson, but I think it makes sense that the first hire is someone just to help with fulfillment or admin work to free up your time so you could focus on sales, because I think, especially in the beginning, no one's really going to sell better than you. Yeah. You have really built up that, you haven't really built it up yet to be able to train other people to do that if you haven't figured it out quite yourself. Yeah, that's a good point. I think for a long time, and I would still say, even still now, I do a lot of the selling in my business. Finding a good salesperson or a good marketing person who really is passionate and cares, that's, I mean, it's tough. It can be difficult. Definitely. Yeah. Well, AJ, I think this has been a lot of fun. Hopefully, Tamer, hopefully we've answered your question. I know you didn't specifically ask us. Like I said, I stole this question from Twitter, but I just thought it was such a good one. And I think something a lot of people struggle with, which is like, how do I even out this roller coaster lifestyle that I'm living as I'm freelancing as I'm trying to grow an agency. I've been pressed and Lee joined by AJ Kassada. AJ really quickly remind people where they can find and connect with you. Yeah, the best place to connect would be on LinkedIn at AJ Kassada. And also, we started a YouTube channel in the past year, which is also my name, AJ Kassada. Perfect. We'll be sure to link to those. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you want to have your question answered on the air, you just have to send us an email or a voice mill. You can do both of those or either of those at freelance to founder dot com slash ask the music in today's episode. And every day is brought to you by Joaquin Karude. The song is called Road Trip. We appreciate the song Joaquin. And we will catch you next time on the next episode of freelance to founder. See ya. [Music] There are a bunch of ways to prevent crime that no one is talking about. Like how wind direction can make your community more violent or peaceful. And how GLP1 meds could reduce felonies. This is Fighting Crime, where we ask the big questions. What if we've been having the wrong conversations about crime? Two policies, ban the box and clean slate. Don't seem to be helping even though they sounded like they should or they would. I'm your host, Christina Quinn. I'm going across the country from prisons to universities, police chiefs to inmates. To look at the evidence and question everything we think we know about how to make America safer. Economists think a lot about helping respond to incentives. If we want to reduce crime and change behavior, we need to increase the costs or reduce the benefit. Join us as we figure out new ways to fight crime and be prepared to think differently. 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