How To Make The Shift From Freelancer To Business Owner

If you're on this video, you're probably wondering, what if I'm a freelancer? What if I work a 9 to 5 and I've never had a business before? Will I be successful in running a business if I so choose to do it right? Because you're probably watching this, wondering these things, saying, I've freelanced most of my life. I was a freelance DP for five years, by the way. So I understand where you're at. Or maybe you're in a 9 to 5 and you can't afford to leave just yet because you don't have enough clients to pay for whatever you're making in your 9 to 5, which I'm a big proponent of. Keep that 9 to 5 work to build this thing on the side, which I'm going to go into some of our strategies in just a second in this video of what we do with our clients like that. Because we don't want you leaving that nine to five until you've actually had the stability and have these deals in place to where, like, we've had clients where they're making, you know, maybe 10k a month in a job or 5k a month in a job. We help them get one client paying them 5k a month. Then we get them another client paying them another 5k a month. Now they're making 10k a month and they feel comfortable to leave that other 5k a month job. Job, right? But I like to say, like, I'm. I'm not a huge person of, like, I don't love taking huge risks unless there's like a real reward there. And so I would tell you, keep the 9 to 5. Work with either us or somebody like us, right? To help you craft the right strategy. So you can actually land a couple of retainers that will replace your 9 to 5, and then you can make that switch. Right? Which is huge. So let's jump over to the iPad. Maybe you're a freelancer. Maybe you do. You're in a 9 to 5. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of clients that we've worked with. We've successfully helped them transition from that 9 to 5 from being a freelancer to having business clients. Now probably wondering, I don't have any business clients. How do I make that transition? How do I. Can I even make this transition? And what does that look like? I'm gonna go through the strategy here in this video. I'm gonna break down a couple of our clients right here. All right, so number one, this is Brandon, Brandon right here. Mr. Man Bun. We love him, he's awesome. Went from literally zero and I. And I mean zero when I say zero, I mean he was a, any he up to a couple months ago was a full time church video director. He was doing the videos at churches full time job. We helped him get a couple of clients in the home service niche and then he made enough money to where he decided, hey, I'm gonna leave the full time job, but I'm gonna make the church one of my clients. Which is awesome. So he actually turned the 9 to 5 job into a retainer client that pays him every single month as he's also working with these home service companies. So Brandon started with us, had no clients. Basically what we did with him is we helped him come up with an offer, right? Then we helped him get some case studies in that offer. Then we helped him set up his ads so he could get more leads and then we helped him with his sales so he could close multiple of those retainer clients. Brandon charges anywhere between 3 to 8k a month for home service clients to help them with their content, with their marketing, with their leads, with their ads. And essentially we had gotten a couple of those clients and he was feeling good. He's feeling in a place where he's like, hey, I feel like I can actually leave this job. I have the income, right. I have dual incomes, but I don't have enough time now. Right. And that's one of the biggest things that you're going to run into is you'll be, you'll be having business clients, but you also have the job. So you don't have enough time. And that's usually when we say, okay, you feel comfortable, you've replaced your income with the business clients. Now if you feel ready, you can make that jump and leave. Right. But without us doing like the beta client strategy that I'm going to go with, go through with you in this video later on. It would be difficult to do that because he didn't have any, he wouldn't have had any clients paying him yet. So Brandon's a good example of that. Now he's doing 34k a month. He's doing close to 50k a month. Cause this case studios recorded a while ago. You can go watch this on our YouTube channel. Another one would be Daniel. He's more of a freelancer, had never really had an official business. And basically what we did with him is we worked with him to help him refine his sales, his offerings. We put a standardized offering in place to where it's like, we have a three, six and 12 month package. And then from there he ended up selling one of those packages for 18k in just three weeks. And one of the biggest things for him is he started to actually feel like a business because he had offers, he wasn't doing the gig to gig thing. And coming from someone who was a freelancer and still like, I still identify as that sometimes is like I was a freelance DP for five years. That world is very different than becoming a business. The freelance world is more of, hey, I got a gig, like, here's my day rate, like, when can I come out and shoot? Whereas what we're doing is we're saying, hey, we have three, six and 12 month packages. We're going after a specific business like home service businesses or medical businesses or law firms, or like a specific vertical, specific niche. And we're gonna sell them a comprehensive solution to their problem that includes video. And so when you make that kind of transition from freelancer to someone who's selling a package, you make the transition from, I'm not just selling my time, I'm selling results. And because I'm selling results, I can actually hire people under me to fulfill on those results so I can make money independent of my time. Which is the beautiful thing about having a business is like, if you want to go on vacation for two weeks and you have a full team of people who can shoot the content, edit the content, run the ads, manage the clients, then you're not really needed anymore, right? And so you're not really needed in the business for it to operate, which is a nice place to get to because now you have other people handling this stuff for you. Whereas, like, as a freelancer, you can't take a vacation. If you take a vacation as a freelancer, like, you're not making money for two weeks. And obviously the inside joke is that everyone calls you and offers you jobs when you go on vacation, right? That's what everyone says, happen to me all the time. But when you do that, you're trading your time for money. Whereas when you become a business owner, you're trading, you're not trading your time for money. You can buy other people's time because you have these retainers paying you three, six, 12 months, right? So that's kind of the freelance angle. And then last one, Shay went from literally zero, and I mean zero to 12k a month. And I think he's actually, he called me the other day, I have to do an updated case study with him, I think, I think he's doing close to 30 or 40k a month right now, which is amazing. Which is awesome. Same deal, right. So came to us, we did offer, we did case studies, we did ads and then we helped them with their sales. So now they have consistent people paying them between 2 and 8k a month on retainer. So then they continuously pay them. And he has people who, he hired a social media manager, hired a videographer, hired an editor, hired people under him so then he could buy his time back and not have to do, do everything himself. Right. And actually start to build a business, a system, which business is just another fancy way of saying system. A system that operates without him. And so he's not plugged into that system as much as he was when he was working his 9 to 5 or being a freelancer. Right. So let's walk through what the strategy actually looks like. We've done this in our other videos, in my wedding video. I'm going from weddings, but same same strategy. Right. So number one, what we're going to do is we're going to help you get case studies with ideal with your ideal client or ideal niche using our beta client strategy. And so this is when we're doing our work for a discounted retainer for a select group of clients, whether this is either people in your network, people that we do outreach to, we help you with a strategy around that. You get those two to three case studies and now it looks like you work in that niche. Right. So you get two to three case studies in home service and medical and whatever. Right. Then we're then going to leverage those case studies to then get full paying retainers. And then you're always going to be getting more and more case studies as you continue to get amazing results for your clients. Clients. But we're going to leverage those to get full paying retainers. Then finally we're going to help you scale, hire that team to do the work for you. And then we go through, then we go through running the ads, getting consistent lead flow, getting consistent people booking on your calendar. But this is how we make that kind of initial jump in the beginning, right. If you feel like, hey, I'm an imposter, I don't really have anybody that I've helped. These case studies are huge because they help build your confidence that you can actually help this type of person. So hopefully that makes sense if you are a freelancer or somebody in your nine to five. That's amazing. That's completely fine. You just have to want to make the shift or the transition into being a business owner and running a business that is independent of your time. And one of the biggest things that swayed me into doing this was I saw the guys who were 60, 70 year old DPs on set, and I didn't want to be that person. I wanted to have time with my family. I wanted to have something that could build, you know, wealth for me and my family and not have to always trade my time for money. By building something that gave me more leverage, right? I got more leverage on my time. I got more leverage on the clients that I'm working with because I could hire amazing people under me to do the work for them who are honestly better than me. Like, I'll be the first person to tell you I'm not the best DP in the world, I'm not the best cinematographer in the world. It's like, I can hire amazing people under me to do that stuff for me. So if that's you, that's great. If you want to learn about how we can actually help you make that transition, click the link below, schedule a demo with our team, or just keep enjoying the free YouTube videos and we'll talk to you in the next one. See ya.