easiest way to make $30k/mo as a creative strategist (I’ve helped 100’s of people)

In this video, I'm gonna show you how you can make $30K a month as a creative strategist. This is everything that we teach inside of our community, and a lot of the original ideas was actually put together by one of the coaches and one of my friends who's in our communities, uh, who makes anywhere from $60K to $70K per month as a creative strategist. And, uh, this is the process that he shared and one that I've seen over and over again inside of our community, inside of our mentorships. Uh, it's a tried and true process, so I'm gonna break it down for you. First, if you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Iha. My business partner Mario Castelli and I are copywriters who have generated over $100 million each with our copy. We have a community of over 433 creative strategists, marketers, and brand owners called Genesis. This community is always growing. We help them make winning ads, funnels, and a fuck ton of money. These are some of the brands that our students work with. Here's a wall of some of our recent wins. It goes on for a pretty big amount. We're not very great at collecting our wins, but there's some good ones that are inside of Here, and this link will be— this doc will be linked down below if you want to check it out a little bit more. That's who we are. So this is how to make $30K a month as a creative strategist. I put this nice little infographic on here, and I'll be breaking it down. And if you want access to this document, you can just opt into the email list below, and you'll get access to this plus every other document that I've shared on this channel. So the first thing you need to understand is the simple math of the creative strategist business, right? Right now, it's basically all about ads. So it's how many briefs can you write times the rate that you get charged plus your bonuses, that equals your income. Okay? Now in general, there's an upper limit to how many briefs that you, one creative strategist can do per month. I know AI changes that, but right now there's kind of an upper limit and there's sort of an upper range for what your realistic rate can be. However, bonuses is something that can go a lot more. So eventually if you wanna scale even to $30K and beyond, you wanna focus on the bonuses. Okay. So the simple flywheel that you want to follow is step 1, you want to audit your clients. Okay, so that's the very first thing that you want to start with. You want to audit your clients. So the basic thing you want to do is you want to list every client and you want to look at how much they— you're basically making per hour. So how long does it take you to write their ads? How much are they paying? What's the average amount of bonuses? And you want to list them and rank them according to that. You also kind of want to factor in some of the other intangible things like, are they a pain in the ass to work with? Do they micromanage you? How many meetings do they have? Do you like the work? So factor those things in and you basically want to make your list of these are my best clients to these are my worst clients. That's the first place to start. The next thing that you want to ask yourself, which is really, really important, is you want to ask, do you have bandwidth? Which by the way, we run a mentorship where we've taken 8 to 10 creative strategists at a time and help them go from You know, some people have went from like $17K a month to $30K a month. Some people went from zero to $12K per month. Some people went from like $5K a month to $14K per month. And so we've done this process over and over and over again. We have like probably like a 95% success rate with that, 98% success rate. I have to actually look at that. We basically had one person not hit those goals and get a major ROI from the program. So it's a very successful mentorship and this is the process that we follow. First, you need to audit your clients. Next thing you need to do is ask yourself, do you have bandwidth? It's the first thing. So bandwidth just means, could you take on another client doing 5 to 10 briefs per week? If the answer is no and you're full, you basically have 2 different options. So the first option is to get faster at writing ads. And in general, you should be doing this. So when we look at speed, this is on here. There's basically 4 different areas you can fall into. So You could fall into fast, which is basically less than 25 minutes per brief. Again, if you have great AI processes like the ones that we have inside of Genesis and elsewhere, you could definitely get it below 25 minutes or around that amount of time. But that's basically fast for what I'm seeing with Curtis Chad just right now. A sweet spot is anywhere from, you know, 25 to 30 or 35 minutes. Average is maybe 45 to 60 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever. Slow is if you're taking longer than an hour per brief. You basically wanna work on your speed. Okay? So if you're struggling, you don't have bandwidth, the first thing you wanna do is you wanna see, can I get my workflows down a lot better? So there's some different things that you can do, right? Instead of trying to make every ad a perfect 10, just focus on making it a 7 to an 8 and make your hooks a 10 out of 10. Make sure that you are swiping winning formats and winning styles that exist. Make sure you're using AI processes again, like the ones that we have inside of our Genesis program. Whatever it is, find your workflows and try to get your workflow down to about 25 minutes or less per ad. And that's how you'll free up bandwidth for yourself. Okay? The next one is if you still don't have bandwidth, what you have to do is you have to get rid of clients. So one of the best lessons and the most important thing that we do inside of our mentorship, they're pretty funny. We run our mentorships for about 8 weeks and typically in the first 4 to 5 weeks, Almost everybody goes down in terms of their income. Almost everybody. Almost everybody ends up firing one or two of their clients because typically the arrangement is not right. They're not getting paid enough. They're doing work that's not quite creative strategy. They didn't set up a good deal. There's too many meetings. The person's a pain in the ass to deal with. There's no upside. They've already gotten what they want out of it. So a huge step that you have to make is you have to be willing to fire a client. So Cosmin. who's the coach who helped me come up with some of this stuff, you know, he's making anywhere from $60K to $70K+ per month. He basically had a period where he was stuck at around $12K or $13K for over a year. And he basically had to make the decision to fire a bunch of clients, go back to around $5K per month. And then he, you know, within a month later, he was making $20K to $30K and he's never gone below that since. Okay. So being able to fire your clients is, is really, really, really important. So if you don't have bandwidth and you're already sort of capped out in terms of speed, Then what you want to do is you basically want to fire your lowest paying client. Now, what you could do is you try to replace them first, or you could fire them first and then replace them after. Neither one is bad, but if you are capped with your bandwidth and you don't even have time to do outreach, sometimes you just got to kind of, you know, eat the frog and fire the client and then make them back up, right? And typically the pressure that you feel and sort of, there's a spiritual principle when you make way for something, a newer and better opportunity comes into play. Okay, so let's say that you do have bandwidth. The next thing you want to ask yourself is, do you have ideal proof, right? Do you have ideal proof? And there's different types of proof, but I basically put them into 4 different tiers on here to make this really easy for you. So ideal proof is enough proof to allow you to work with a big brand and get paid. That's what I would consider ideal proof. So let me break it down a little bit more. So one of the tiers you could have is you could have no proof. This means you have no winners on real accounts. You only have the job, you know, you don't have any winners on real accounts. Then there's bronze, which means you basically have like one decent brand that's maybe 7 or 8, 9 figures, or maybe you have an ad that has like 5-figure spend. Like you have something to show for it, but it's not really strong. Okay. But this is right where like if you get a lucky break or somebody likes you and you have only bronze level proof, but you have a connection, you could probably get into a top brand. And if you're good, you could perform there, right? So bronze level proof is sometimes just enough for you to start moving forward, but oftentimes you need to, you know, butcher your proof a little bit more. So this is where you get into silver. Silver is where you have a couple decent brands you've worked with, maybe multiple 5-figure or even 6-figure spend with your ads. This right here is where with a little bit of hustle and this level of proof, you could probably work with any brand that you want to. Okay. If you really work for it. So anywhere between bronze and silver is where you have enough, enough proof. So what do I mean by this? Basically, if you have bandwidth and you're a creative strategist and you don't have proof, you're kind of in this none to bronze level. The only thing you should be focused on is getting a client that can give you proof. So this basically means either a client that is kind of a notable brand around the, you know, 8 or 9 figure area or a brand where you basically can, you know, make 5-figure ads or 6-figure ads, right? Where they're spending that much. That's really all that you wanna focus on. I wouldn't care about how much money I'm making because the proof will pay for itself a lot later, even if you did it for free. Okay? I don't recommend that you do, but my point is don't optimize for the payment. You're optimizing for the proof because the name of the game is just proof. How much ad spend do you have? That's basically all that you need. So if you have bandwidth and you, you're not at this ideal proof, you just focus on getting really good clients. So the ways that you can do this are one, working with agencies is a great route. They typically don't pay well, anywhere from $30 to $50 per brief, which is pretty low. However, they often work with really big brands, so you can get a lot of spend behind your ads and you can also write ads for specific brands. It's kind of a great way to start getting spend and get your foot in the door. You can also use like outrageous kinds of outreach. So things like what we call the nuclear VSL, which is a specific process of filming a Loom video and certain things that you say. So again, you can just kind of hustle your way into it, be a part of communities, just catch a lucky break, kind of hustle your way in via an agency. There's different ways to kind of get out of this, this little like don't have proof purgatory. And it's worth it because once you get into here, everything works. Okay, so hopefully that makes sense. If you have bandwidth and you don't have ideal proof, everything you're doing is aimed at getting that proof. Okay, so that's all that you're trying to do. Now, if you do have ideal proof kind of in this silver, bronze to silver, silver range, then you could start focusing on, you know, let's start making some money. You still ultimately want to get to this gold tier. Where you have 3 or more solid brands that you've worked with that are notable, multiple 6 or even 7-figure ad spend. Once you're in this place right here, you're pretty much Gucci. Like, especially right now, the way the market is, people will be coming to you. You're not really gonna have any trouble reaching out to clients, and it's not really worth optimizing for proof. That's when you can switch to optimizing for money. Okay, so hopefully this makes sense. Your goal is to get to gold as fast as you can. Once you get to this bronze and silver range, you can start kind of optimizing for proof and income. Once you hit gold, you just optimize for income. So hopefully that makes sense right here. Okay, so anytime something changes, you land a client, you get a winner, you lose a client, you go back to basically step 1. Okay, it's as simple as that. That's the process. A couple of the other things that are important to understand, we talked about speed, we talked about proof. This is the income tiers. So You know, kind of a basic breakdown of what you might look like from $0 to $10K, $10 to $20K, $20 to $30K, and $30K+. Let's actually go back into the doc because that'll be a little bit clearer. So this breaks down the same process that we talked about. We talked about speed. That's the process on here. We talked about proof. That's that process. For outreach, you want to do things like LinkedIn, Upwork, Hiree, job boards, communities, and groups. Things like that. My biggest advice is when you're doing the outreach, be super clear about what you're looking for. Like, what's the criteria? How much are they gonna pay you per brief? What are the, the meetings and things that you're looking for? Are you optimizing for proof? Are you optimizing for spend? That kind of thing. Here's a little bit of those income tiers that we talked about again. So $20K to $30K is typically gonna be about 3 to 5 clients paying you about $4K to $7K a month per each, $150 to $200 a brief. About 10 briefs a week per client. Bonus structures and incentives start mattering. You should be at silver proof and closing in on gold. You're fast now, 25 to 30 minutes a brief. So 10 briefs in the morning. And this tier is where inbound starts. You can begin choosing clients instead of taking them, right? And these are this bracket here. Once you reach about $30K, this is kind of what that looks like. When you hit $30K, again, this is sort of the ideal setup. 3 strong brands that are paying you anywhere from $8K to $10K a month each with 3% to 5% performance-based bonus. Bonuses, clear responsibilities, good editors, data access, autonomy, about 3 calls a week total, no more than 4. That's about $24K to $30K a month plus bonuses and 3 to 4 days off a week. And it's a pretty good setup. Okay. From here, if you want to grow past that, you can add in more clients. You could get a junior or become a little mini agency if you want to. You could add in leverage. So things like have a brand coaching info agency, whatever it is that you want to do. Or you could just work with bigger brands that have bigger budgets and just focus on getting better so you get bigger bonuses, right? If you really wanna be a creative strategist and just focus on that, that's the way to go because from here you basically gotta kind of branch off to do more right now. Even when you get to kind of that gold level proof, you don't wanna stop with your outreach. So what you wanna do typically, it doesn't mean you need to do active outreach, but these are some of the things you wanna do. Be active in communities like Genesis, our community, LinkedIn, D2C circles, be visible and useful. Stay friends with people, be friendly. Post your wins on LinkedIn. This is huge. You'll get tons of inbound by doing this. Update your portfolio. Basically any inbound leads that you get, take those calls. We've basically found for our creative strategists that just taking sales calls and taking those inbound calls increases your confidence with future clients and other clients. It just gives you an abundance mindset. So I highly recommend that you do it. And then if you ever need to, you can always turn the gas back on. Okay, it's a pretty simple process. So hopefully this gives you kind of a clear roadmap on the things to focus on. Again, the first step is just audit your clients, audit your proof, audit your bandwidth, right? So you basically wanna understand, do I have bandwidth or not? What are my best clients ranked to my worst clients? Know that I'm probably gonna have to fire people to make my bandwidth. Understand how fast am I? Do I need to focus on my speed or am I kind of okay? And do I still need to optimize for proof or do I need to optimize for income? Because I've also already kind of hit those specific proof standards. So hopefully this makes sense and was helpful. If not, please comment below what else you wanna know, what's confusing, any questions that you have. I would love to answer those questions and I'm open to any other video ideas as well. I appreciate taking your time and I'll see you in the next video.