How To Stop Grinding And Scale Profit In Your Creative Business
If you are a 1-2 person branding agency, you probably work a lot more than you would at a day job, and get paid a lot less than you deserve. But imagine…
Imagine if you could work a normal 40-hour workweek (or even less), instead of nights and weekends as needed.
Imagine if you never had to spend hours writing proposals just to pitch for a project, but instead got paid for that time.
Imagine if you didn’t have to give away free strategy sessions to show your worth, but instead got paid for that time.
Imagine if every project came in under the number of hours that you planned for, instead of always going over.
Imagine all that and you actually turned a healthy profit.
If this sounds like a fantasy, you’re probably suffering from the bane of most creative entrepreneur’s existence known as “scope creep”—where you end up wasting precious hours on things like planning, pitching, hustling, and trying to prove your worth before you ever get a signature or deposit.
Scope creep is the reality for many creatives who are struggling to get clients on their schedule. But is it a necessary cost of doing business? Or can you really, actually, truly thrive as a creative without having to work just as hard to get clients as you do on client projects?
How Scope Creep and Free Work Happens
When I first started my business, free work and endless hustling were my reality, too. The all-too-common process for creatives trying to get work is networking, and when that’s your main source of clients, you spend a TON of time doing it.
I used to have coffee dates back to back-to-back, all day long (and the daily caffeine crashes that came with them). I thought if I just grinded this out enough, someone would eventually bite. Since everyone was looking for services like mine, I did get some bites here and there.
But what I found out very early on was that people knew they needed what I offered, but they didn’t know me. Therefore, given all the competition, they had no reason to hire me, except if somebody had recommended me. This is why I had to spend so much time face-to-face with prospects and potential referral partners: it was the only way I could show them how great I was and why they should hire and refer me.
If you do end up meeting with a prospect, most creatives are all-too-happy to give away free consultations and strategy sessions during these coffee dates because they are desperate to communicate, “Hey, look how much I know! You should hire me.”
After what becomes an initial free consultation, the next phase, if you're lucky, is a request for proposal — which is code for more of your time spent, unpaid.
Steve and I were designing and writing entire decks as our proposals because we felt like the proposal was where we could shine. We thought we could not only show them the kind of work that we could do but also be very specific and explicit about every single step of the project, the timeline, how much it would cost, and what the deliverables were. We wanted to impress the client, so we took no shortcuts.
We also did this to make sure that we were on the same page so that they didn't think we were going to give them something that wasn't on our list later. We were trying to prevent scope creep, so these super-detailed proposals would take us hours and just a form of pre-scope, scope creep.
Then we would send the proposal—and this is often where most prospects disappear.
This is usually when people start comparing you with other proposals. If you don’t win the project, rarely will you get a call, email or even a lowly text to let you know you won’t be getting hired. They may also just decide not to do this project at this moment anymore. You’ll usually never know.
This is when all that time you spent in person talking to them, strategizing for them, bending over backwards to impress them, writing a proposal, thinking about them, waiting for them—all of it is gone.
If you’re lucky, they ink the deal. But more often they’ll come back and leverage the other bids to try to drive down your price (which you already set as low as you possibly can to be competitive). Negotiating price is a topic for another article, but regardless of the outcome, you’ve already put in tons of unpaid time and effort.
Even if you get the job, there’s always additional work to be done.
Maybe they need extra meetings you didn’t account for.
Maybe they’re always late to the meetings.
Maybe they’re slow about getting you the information you need.
Maybe the project ends up taking longer than expected.
Regardless of how the project goes, when you get that final check, it never feels like as much as what you know you deserve for all the work you put in.
This is what I’ve found to be the default way creatives run their businesses. I call it the grind because it truly never stops. The only exciting moments of that entire experience are when the client says yes, when you get that first check, and maybe a couple of moments into the project when they're excited about the work you have delivered. Everything else is a slog.
It doesn't have to be that way. We did that grind for years, and we thought we were doing the right thing because we were doing what everybody around us was doing. And that landed us in debt. We finally shifted our business because we landed in debt, and it forced us to reevaluate everything.
Process Is Where The Profit Is
I’ll be the first to preach that more is not always better.
Less can sneak up and be way more than what it looks like, which is what we discovered with a product that helped us get out of debt. Our Brandup service product, which we practically developed by accident, started out at a measly $3,000 compared to our full service branding projects at the time which were $30,000. But we found it was a much more strategic and surprisingly more profitable service.
We militantly limited the time and scope of this product and stuck to a strict, this-is-what’s-included list. Because the larger projects had to be “custom” to justify the high price tag, they could go on forever and required tons of ongoing, back-and-forth management. But with the Brandup, we knew exactly how long a project would take and when it would end, which eliminated all the complications that came with the long, drawn-out custom projects. I’ll take a quick, clearly defined $3,000 project over a $30,000 do everything they need whenever they need it forever and ever project every single time.
We no longer write proposals.
Our projects have very clear timelines.
We have freed up so much time in our lives.
We spend lots of that time creating marketing content that attracts clients to us.
Now we don't have to look for clients anymore, they come to us.
If you're an expert, you can develop your own unique process based on your experience to eliminate your biggest problems. For us, those biggest problems were all the free work and the fact that we were always on call for these clients. There was endless scope creep.
Any service business that wants to eliminate the free work and scope creep is going to need to incorporate some, if not all, of the aspects that we have incorporated into our process. If you want to hear more about how you can do that, you should check out this blueprint on scaling profit and freedom for branding agency owners, without having to hire a team.